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Our other mother, Edith, implored, and was laughed down by Charley, who declared she could swim, and that she did not think Uncle Martyn would have been so old-womanish. Metelill was so tender and caressing with her frightened mother that I thought here at last was submission, and with a good grace.
This spiteful trick, if it be true that she meant it, seems to have been done on Metelill, as being supposed to be her only real rival. Avice always yields to her, and besides, is too inoffensive to afford her any such opportunity. When I talked to Mary, she said, "Oh yes, I always knew she was a horrid little treacherous puss. Nature began it, and that governess worked on a ready soil.
The carriage is taking some one to the station, and is to call for her and me to bring us to luncheon, the kind people promising likewise to send us back. So I asked whether I might bring a niece who had not been able to come yesterday, and as the young people had, as usual, become enamoured of Metelill, they begged for her likewise.
Indeed, I believe Avice is to write a special journal, to be published in the BOURNE PARVA PARISH MAGAZINE; Charley begs for a sea-horse, and Freddy has been instructed by one of the pupils to bargain for nothing less than the Colossus of Rhodes; Metelill is quite as cordial in her rejoicing, and Edith owns that, now it has come to the point, she is very glad to keep her daughter. And Isa?
"And dear Metelill is so gentle and gracious that she cannot bear to repel any one," says the mother, who would, I see, be thankful to part with either daughter to our keeping in hopes of breaking off perilous habits. I was saved, however, from committing myself by the coming in of Isabel. That child follows me about like a tame cat, and seems so to need mothering that I cannot bear to snub her.
At least Metelill asked the explanation, but I doubt whether she listened much while Avice and I talked out the matter, and I felt myself a girl again, holding the old interminable talks with the first dear Avice, before you made her my sister for those two happy years, and Well, it is no use paining you and myself with going back to those days, though there was something in the earnest thoughtfulness and depth of her young namesake and godchild that carried me back to the choicest day of companionship before you came on the scene.
I acquit Metelill and Isa of all but thoughtless habit, and Pica was absorbed. She can be well mannered enough when she is not defending the rights of woman, or hotly dogmatical on the crude theories she has caught and suppose she has thought out, poor child!
Metelill would be the prettiest and sweetest ornament of our drawing-room, and would amuse you the most; Pica, with her scholarly tastes, would be the best and most appreciative fellow-traveller; and Jane, if she could or would go, would perhaps benefit the most by being freed from a heavy strain, and having her views enlarged.
Jane, not at all conscious of being an offender, howled at her that this was her horrible liberalism and neology, while Metelill asked what was become of loyalty. "That depends on what you mean by it," returned our girl graduate. "LOI- AUTE, steadfastness to principle, is noble, but personal loyalty, to some mere puppet or the bush the crown hangs on, is a pernicious figment."
But after a turn on the esplanade among the pupils, back came Metelill in a hurry to say, "Dear mother, will you very much MIND if I go? They will be so disappointed, and there will be such a fuss if I don't; and Charley really ought to have some one with her besides Pie, who will heed nothing but magnifying medusae."
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