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Isa was very much upset at my displeasure. She came to me afterwards and said she was greatly grieved; but Metelill would not move, and she had always supposed it wrong to make acquaintance with strangers in that chance way.
When we went home, Metelill was as proud and delighted as possible at what she called the Bird's triumph; but Avice did not seem at all elated, but to take her knowledge as a mere outcome of her ordinary Oxford life, where allusions, especially Ruskinese and Dantesque, came naturally.
Avice was silent at first, but Metelill drew her out, and she had become quite at her ease before we arrived. You would have been enchanted to see how much was made of our dear mother. Lord Hollybridge came out himself to give her his arm up the stone steps and across the slippery hall. The good old chief talked to her by the hour about you, and Avice's eyes shone all the time.
I heard Charley call her 'a jolly old party, and Metelill respond that she was 'a sweet old thing. Why, we should have thought such expressions about our grandmother a sort of sacrilege, but when I ventured to hint as much Charley flippantly answered, "Gracious me, we are not going back to buckram"; and Metelill, with her caressing way, declared that she loved dear granny too much to be so stiff and formal.
There was no time to make up things for two, and being in mourning, she could not borrow, though Metelill would have been too happy to lend. She says she shall be very happy with the children, but I can't help thinking there was a tear in her eye when she ran to fetch her dress cloak for Jane, whom, by the bye, Avice has made wonderfully more like other people.
And now, because you are jealous of poor Metelill, and think Aunt Charlotte may take a fancy to you instead of her, you are sticking his photo into her book just to do her harm with the aunts. I'm not strait-laced.
In early morning I see the brown heads and blue bathing-dresses, a- mermaiding, as they call it, in the cove below, and they come in all glowing, with the floating tresses that make Metelill look so charming, and full of merry adventures at breakfast. Very merry both of them are; Martyn and Horace Druce are like boys together, and the girls scream with laughter, rather too much so sometimes.
Poor Edith fell into such a state of nervous anxiety that I could not leave her, and she confided to me how Charley had caught her foolish masculine affectations in the family of this very Bertie Elwood, and told me of the danger of an attachment between Metelill and a young government clerk who is always on the look-out for her.
However, this fox-terrier made Metelill protest against sleeping at the hotel with her sister, and her mother begged us to take her in. Thereupon, Emily saw Isa looking annoyed, and on inquiry she replied sweetly, "Oh, never mind, aunty dear; I daresay Wasp won't be so bad as he looks; and I'll try not to be silly, and then I daresay Charley will not tease me!
I don't think it is old-maidish in us to be scandalised at her walking up and down the esplanade with young Horne till ten o'clock last night; Charley was behind with Bertie Elwood, and, I grieve to say, was smoking. It lasted till Horace Druce went out to tell them that Metelill must come in at once, as it was time to shut up the house.
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