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Updated: June 7, 2025
Lalage's frock was torn. The rent was a long one, extending diagonally from the waistband to the bottom hem. I knew, even while I offered one from the back of my tie, that a pin would be no use. "Cattersby," said Lalage, "will be mad raging mad. She's always at me because things will tear my clothes. Horrid nuisance clothes are, aren't they? But Cattersby doesn't think so of course.
I said that I understood what this marker meant; but Lalage, who even then had a remarkable faculty for getting at the naked truth of things, did not even pretend to believe me. "Come along," she said, "and I'll show you why." I followed her meekly, leading my bicycle, which, like Lalage's frock, had suffered in its contest with the laurel.
For instance, the very first paragraph in this pillory of Lalage's was devoted to a bishop, I forget his name and territorial title, who had denounced Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe." Some evil-minded person had put forward this novel as a suitable reading book for Irish boys and girls in secondary schools, and the bishop had objected strongly. Lalage was cheerfully contemptuous of him.
And then if, after they were married, they came across someone belonging to Lalage's old life that was the worst idea of all, intolerable, wholly abominable.
I put this letter of Lalage's aside and did not answer it for some time. I thought that she and Hilda might have misunderstood what my uncle and the Archdeacon were saying. I did not regard it as possible that an important matter of the kind should be settled without my knowing anything about it; and I expected that Lalage would find out her mistake for herself.
This seemed to me a further symptom of nerve storm. I encouraged her to speak, as tactfully as I could. "Has Miss Battersby," I asked, "rebelled against her destiny?" Lalage's face suddenly puckered up in a very curious way. I should have supposed that she was on the verge of tears if there existed any record of her ever having shed tears.
As a diplomatist I suppose I am a diplomatist of a minor kind whose lot is cast among the Latin peoples, I am inclined to think that Lalage's interpretation may one day be universally accepted as the true one and so honoured with the crown of orthodoxy. It would even to-day strike a Portuguese journalist as a simple statement of an obvious truth.
She knows Miss Pettigrew and does not think she is the kind of person who would attach excessive importance to the position of Lalage's legs. She thinks that the maxim referred to by Lalage there evidently was a maxim in her mind when she wrote must have fallen from the lips of Miss Campbell, the mathematician, Carpy, or the purple-gowned woman.
If Lalage's Gazette disgusted them with me and made it obvious that I could not succeed as a candidate in the East Connor Division of County Down I should be greatly pleased, and my ten pounds, or whatever larger sum might be required to pacify the fiercest of the bishops, would be very well spent. I opened the Archdeacon's letter next.
Newspapers are, as a rule, busy enough about what happens even in quite obscure constituencies during by-elections. If ours had been one of those occasional contests the subject of public lying, Lalage's portrait and the story of the two bands men would have been quite familiar to all readers. During a general election very few details of particular campaigns can be printed.
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