"Skittles?" he suggested frivolously.
"No. Lawn tennis. Well! why not?"
"What is lawn tennis?" asked Nelly.
"A game, my dear; and you shall learn it."
"I never play games," said Rebekah. "A serious person has no room in her life for games."
"Then call it exercise, and you will be able to play it without wounding your conscience." This was Harry's remark. "Why not, indeed, Miss Kennedy? The game of lawn tennis, Nelly," he went on to explain, "is greatly in vogue among the bloated aristocracy, as my cousin Dick will tell you. That it should descend to you and me and the likes of us is nothing less than a social revolution."
Nelly smiled, but she only half understood this kind of language. A man who laughed at things, and talked of things as if they were meant to be laughed over, was a creature she had never before met with. My friends, lay this to heart, and ponder. It is not until a certain standard of cultivation is reached that people do laugh at things. They only began in the last century, and then only in a few salons. When all the world laughs, the perfection of humanity will have been reached, and the comedy will have been played out.
"It is a beautiful game," said Angela—meaning lawn tennis, not the comedy of humanity. "It requires a great deal of skill and exercises a vast quantity of muscles; and it costs nothing. Asphalt makes a perfect court, as I know very well." She blushed, because she was thinking of the Newnham courts. "We shall be able to play there whenever it does not rain. When it does, there is the glass-house."
"What are you going to do in the glass-house?" asked Harry; "throw stones at other people's windows? That is said to be very good exercise."
"I am going to set up a gymnasium for the girls."