Then Ariadne started an essay club with prizes. The Squire bought those for her in Morpeth when he went in to sell pelts and hides. Fancy touching his hand after that! They were bits of his poor beasts that he had killed! Billy Scott’s short essay on the elephant, “an animal with a leg at each corner and a tail at both ends,” was funny; and Sally Moscrop’s description of “any animal she liked to choose.” She invented “The Proc,” a beast with four legs, “two of whom are bigger and longer than the others, for the Proc lives all around a hill.” Grace Paterson’s essay was quite long. “The Pin is an exceedingly useful article. It has saved the lives of many men, many women and many children by not swallering of them.”
Grace is fourteen and the beauty of the village. She has begun a tale in ten chapters. She has to write it up in the apple-tree, for fear her father should “warm” her.
She and Ariadne were the two belles of the Ball in the Parish Room on Monday evening. They both danced with the Squire, who said he was in luck to get two literary ladies to dance with him on the same night. But Ariadne walked home with him, and I went with Christina. Mr. Rochester had one of his own roses Ariadne had given him back, in his button-hole. She is so unhappy about Simon that she doesn’t care who proposes to her. That is the way girls take it—a very selfish way, but they are selfish all through when they are in love. Ariadne actually thinks the Squire thinks he proposed to her going home that night. I don’t. It was pitch dark as we went home, the village is not lighted, and it is a very wicked village. She says, long arms like tentacles came groping out from the wall in the dark, and the Squire dragged her past them. As the village young men couldn’t see, they thought her one of their own sweethearts, for by then the party had broken up and was all over the place. The chucker-out had been very much occupied and had found the brook near the school-house door very handy.
But I don’t myself think the Squire did propose. He offered to take care of her, past the tentacles, but not for life. I think if a girl is always dreading proposals and thinking of how men will feel it when refused, proposals never come to them. That is what Christina said, and that Peter Ball took her entirely by surprise, when he asked her. I knew better, for I had chaperoned that affair. She says Peter wears very well, and that there’s some gilt left on the gingerbread still. The gramophone is still in all its glory, and when she was ill up-stairs, when Jim was born, Peter used to send up a message by the nurse for her to leave the door of her room open for half-an-hour before dinner, and then she would hear it. The nurse always forbade it, but Christina always insisted on it, to please Peter, and lay with her ears stopped up with sheet till the half hour was over. It is a new gramophone, not the one he had in Leinster Gardens. That shouted itself out, I suppose? Christina found an entry in his old pocket-book—
“July 19—a memorable year in my life. I bought a new gramophone and I got married. I won’t say anything about my wife here, but the gramophone was a beauty when she was new——“
Ariadne was disgusted. She doesn’t believe Simon would say such a coarse thing. Well, I wish she had some experience on the subject, what Simon would say, that’s all!
When Simon did come over to shoot, Ariadne hardly spoke to him during the three days he was here. No one did, much. He is so fearfully eligible that all the nice girls feel they must snub him, and he hardly gets a cup of tea. If Christina hadn’t known nice girls only, Ariadne would have had a better chance. What is the good of being a nice modest girl among other nice modest girls? And though Ariadne would not believe it, she did badly without her foil Lady Scilly, who showed up her niceness and made Simon draw comparisons. Then there was another adverse circumstance. The Squire came and followed Ariadne about with his eyes, till it really wasn’t safe to sit in a line with them both. That put Simon off. He is too nice to prefer a girl because another man is making himself unhappy about her.
Indeed Simon looked most uncomfortably serious and even sad. He has got his first wrinkle fixed between his eyebrows. He looks at Ariadne often, but in a puzzled sort of way, and takes himself up with a jerk, shaking his head, that the curls are cut off from too short to waggle.
“He cares for me—yes, he cares desperately,” said Ariadne one night, just as she was arranging her watch and her handkerchief on the chair beside our bed, and his photograph under her pillow. I have to take that away every morning lest the housemaid should see it and make fun of her. Ariadne forgets. We also arrange the strap of our box down the middle of the bed so that neither of us should encroach in the other’s part, and all these arrangements take time. Ariadne, though she is so gentle and so in love, always looks sharply to her rights, and more than her rights, and I generally find myself lying on the very rim of the bed. She is the eldest, unfortunately, and once she took the strap out of the bed to me when I objected.
“He loves me—oh, he does!” she moaned, “only he is not free.”