“That’s just the way with you men,” said Alice, smiling; “you affect to be lofty beings, superior to the foible, curiosity. And so you would make a cat’s paw of me?”
“Well, yes; for it is you who want the chestnuts.”
“And my fingers, therefore, are to be burnt; for this same Mr. Don is an awful somebody to approach.”
“To others, perhaps, but not to you; nor to me, either, perhaps; but the chestnuts are for you. Besides, as Dido said to her sister Anna, you know the approaches of the man and the happy moment. How often have I seen every one quaking with awe when you are attacking him with your saucy drolleries, and how charmed he always is, and how he laughs!”
“And poor dear mamma,” said Alice, with a tender smile, “how she shakes and weeps and weeps and shakes! Do you know, Mr. Frobisher, though I say it ‘as shouldn’t,’ I am not, by half, so giddy and brainless as I seem? Do you know why I cut up so many didoes? (By the way, I wonder whether that rather colloquial phrase has any reference to Æneas’s girl?) But it is the truth, that half the time that I am cutting my nonsensical capers, it is just to make mamma laugh. Ah, Mr. Frobisher, you have hardly known what a mother can be, and you will have to love mine! You won’t be able to help it.” And the cutter of capers and of didoes passed her hand across her eyes. “Look,” said she after a pause, “there she sits now, and beside the Don, too. Don’t she look serene? See how she is smiling at me over the banister!” And throwing herself into an attitude, she blew kiss after kiss to Her Serenity, in rapid succession, from alternate hands. “There! she is off. As her eyes are shut tight, she will not be able to see me for half a minute, and I will take the opportunity of telling you, for your comfort, that she does not think there is a man living half good enough for me. How do you feel?”
“I feel that she is right.”
“And I feel that she is twice wrong. First, because she does not know me, and secondly, because she does not know—somebody!” And skipping up the steps, she ran to her mother and bounced into her lap: “Are you glad to see me? Did you think I was never coming back?”
“A bad penny is sure—”
“Who’s a bad penny?” And taking the plump cheeks between her palms, she squeezed the serene features into all manner of grotesque and rapidly-changing shapes. “Who’s a bad penny? Isn’t she a beauty?” said she, twisting the now unresisting head so as to give the Don a full view of the streaming eyes and ludicrously projecting lips. “Behold those æsthetic lines! Ladies and gentlemen,” said she, turning, with a quick movement, her mother’s face in the opposite direction, “I call your attention to the Cupid’s bow so plainly discernible in the curves of that upper lip. Can you wonder that papa is a slave? By the way,” continued she in the same breath, and taking no heed of the general hilarity that she had aroused,—“by the way, Mr. Don, are you glad to see me?” But without waiting for him to find words to reply, a quizzical look came into her face as she observed that with the beat of her mother’s laughter her own person was gently bobbing up and down, as though she rode a pacing horse: “Snow-bird on de ash-bank, snow-bird on de ash-bank, snow-bird on de ash-bank,” she began, in a sort of Runic rhythm, or shall we say in jig measure? “snow-bird on de ash-bank;” and from her curving wrists, drawn close together in front of her bosom, her limp hands swung and tossed, keeping time, jingling like muffled bells. The pacing horse now broke into a canter, and the canter became a gallop: “Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross, ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross! This steed is about to run away; discretion is the better part.” And springing from her mother’s lap, she stood before the Don.
“Have you prepared your answer yet? Are you glad to see me once more?”