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"Aunt Chrysophrasia believes that you are the most extraordinary set of barbarians up there, and she adores barbarians, you know." "Of course we are rather barbarous." "Hermione! How can you say I ever said such a thing!" interposed Miss Dabstreak, with a deprecating glance at Paul.
Carvel wanted him to go and shoot something after lunch, you wanted him to come for a walk, Macaulay wanted him to bury himself up-stairs and talk out the Egyptian question, I wanted to get him into the smoking-room to ask him questions about some friends of mine in the East, Miss Dabstreak had plans to waylay him with her pottery. Not a bit of it! He smiled at us all, and serenely sat by Mrs.
How in the world do you manage it?" "A hard heart, a melancholy temperament, and a large appetite," I answered, with a laugh. "Besides, you have four or five years the better of me." "The worse, you mean. I'm as gray as a badger." "Nonsense. It is your climate that makes people gray. How is Mrs. Carvel, and Hermione, she must have grown up since I saw her, and Miss Dabstreak?"
Carvel and Miss Chrysophrasia Dabstreak, married a Russian in the year 1850, and was never mentioned after the Crimean War, until her son, Paul Patoff, being a diplomatist, made the acquaintance of his first cousin in the person of Macaulay Carvel, who happened to be third secretary in Berlin, when Paul passed through that capital, on his return from a distant post in the East.
"Annie," she continued, addressing her sister, "shall we not ask Mr. Griggs to wreck us? I have always longed to be on a wreck." "No," said Madame Patoff, glancing at her foolish sister with her great dark eyes. "I should not like to be drowned." "Of course not; how very dreadful!" exclaimed Miss Dabstreak. "But Sindbad was never drowned, you remember. It was always somebody else."
"You would turn our fair fields and limpid ahem skies into the joyless waste of a London pavement, or one of your horrid dissecting-rooms!" "I don't see the point of your simile, Miss Dabstreak," answered Cutter, with pardonable bluntness. "Besides, that is philosophy, and not science." "What is the difference. Mr. Griggs?" asked Hermione, turning to me.
If she has sense enough to dress herself gorgeously and to read dry books all day, she has sense enough to travel." "Oh, Chrysophrasia! How dreadfully unkind you are! You know how ill she is." Mrs. Carvel did not like to pronounce the word "insane." She always spoke of Madame Patoff's "illness." "I do not believe it," returned Miss Dabstreak. "She is no more crazy than I am.
"Do you not think learned people are very often dull, Mr. Griggs?" she asked. "Oppressively," I answered. "What makes them so?" "It is the very low and common view which they take of life," put in Miss Dabstreak, who entered the room while we were speaking, and sank upon the couch with a little sigh. "They have no aspirations after the beautiful, and what else can satisfy the human mind?
Griggs, you ought really to tell us a tale from the Arabian Nights. I am sure it would seem so very real, you know." "If I were to spin yarns while steering, Miss Dabstreak," I said, "your fate would probably resemble Sindbad's. You would be wrecked six or seven times between here and Kavák." "So delightfully exciting," murmured Chrysophrasia.
Chrysophrasia paid five hundred pounds for this little gem. But it was not enough for Miss Dabstreak to have collected so many worthless objects of price in her own little corner of the room.
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