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Updated: April 30, 2025
And besides, nothing was ever dull or commonplace where he was; so even in Mrs. Starling's house and Mrs. Flandin's presence, the rest of the evening went brightly off.
Here, therefore, was a quarrel forced upon me, almost against my will, to save the poor starling's life; and, beyond that, the aggravating way in which Weeks looked at me and shook his fist in my face would have provoked even a better-tempered boy than I. Tom Jerrold said afterwards that I turned quite white, as I always did when excited; while Weeks, on the contrary, was naming with fury and as red as a lobster.
Mother and daughter looked at each other in a peculiar way they had now; Diana's face cold, Mrs. Starling's face hard. "Well!" said the latter, "how are you getting along?" "You see, I am down-stairs." "I see you're doing nothing." "Mr. Masters wont let me." "Humph! When I had a baby four weeks old, I had my own way. And so would you, if you wanted to have it."
In the garden, whose shell-strewn paths she now trod, she had played as a child; that window belonged to the room where her mother had died. And then, coming home was in itself a joy, when she had so much to tell that was pleasant. The dog leaped along by her side with vehement affection, jumping round her and on her, and she heard the starling's cry, first "Olympias!" and then "My strength!"
One or two starlings which haunted the house in which we stayed, and slept in their old holes in the thatch, picked up all the various peewits' calls and notes, and used to amuse themselves by repeating these in the apple-trees on sunny mornings. The note was so exact a reproduction that I often looked up to see where the plover was before I made out that it was only the starling's mimicry.
Starling's Josiah and reaches me the invitation. 'There! says I; 'if he ain't a goin' to have Diana Starling! I was beat." "I daresay you could have fitted him just as well," remarked Mrs. Starling. "Wall, I don't know. I was thinkin', but I guess it's as well not to say now what I was thinkin'." "That's so!" assented Miss Barry.
The marsh warbler is our perfect mocking-bird, our one professional mimic; while the starling in comparison is but an amateur. We all know the starling's ever varying performance in which he attempts a hundred things and occasionally succeeds; but even the starling sometimes affects us with a mild astonishment, and I will here give one instance.
"Why, has anybody got to go to church that doesn't want to go?" inquired Diana. But that was like a shell let off in the midst of the sewing circle. "Hear that, now!" said Mrs. Boddington. "Ain't that a rouser!" Mrs. Boddington was a sort of a cousin, and liked the fun; she lived in the one farm-house in sight of Mrs. Starling's. "She don't mean it," said Mrs. Mansfield.
For Evan had chosen her; Evan loved her; the secret bond between them nothing on earth could undo; and any day now that first letter of his might arrive, which her eyes were bright only to think of looking upon. Poor Diana! that letter was jammed up within the bones of Mrs. Starling's stays.
By the time her baskets were full, her fowls fed, her goat foddered, her starling's cage cleaned, her hut door locked, and her wooden shoes clattering on the sunny road into the city, Bébée was almost content again, though ever and again, as she trod the familiar ways, the tears dimmed her eyes as she remembered that old Antoine would never again hobble over the stones beside her.
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