Jane could have shown no temper to the children, for at dinner a roly-poly person of five years old, who seems to absorb all the fat in the family, made known that he had had a very jolly day, and he loved cousin Avice very much indeed, and sister Janie very much indeeder, and he could with difficulty be restrained from an expedition to kiss them both then and there.
The lost box was announced while we were at dinner, and Jane is gone with her faithful Avice to unpack it. Her mother would have done it and sent her boating with the rest, but submitted as usual when commanded to adhere to the former plan of driving with grandmamma. These Druce children must be excellent, according to their mother, but they are terribly brusque and bearish. They are either seen and not heard, or not seen and heard a great deal too much. Even Jane and Meg, who ought to know better, keep up a perpetual undercurrent of chatter and giggle, whatever is going on, with any one who will share it with them.
10.-I am more and more puzzled about the new reading of the Fifth Commandment. None seem to understand it as we used to do. The parents are content to be used as equals, and to be called by all sorts of absurd names; and though grandmamma is always kindly and attentively treated, there is no reverence for the relationship. 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. I quoted-
"If I be a Father, where is My honour?"
And one of them taking it, I am sorry to say, for a line of secular poetry, exclaimed at the stiffness and coldness. Pica then put in her oar, and began to argue that honour must be earned, and that it was absurd and illogical to claim it for the mere accident of seniority or relationship. 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-auté, steadfastness to principle, is noble, but personal loyalty, to some mere puppet or the bush the crown hangs on, is a pernicious figment." Charley shouted that this was the No. 1 letter A point in Pie's prize essay, and there the discussion ended, Isa only sighing to herself, "Ah, if I had any one to be loyal to!"
"How you would jockey them!" cried Charley, turning upon her so roughly that the tears came into her eyes; and I must have put on what you call my Government-house look, for Charley subsided instantly.
11.-Here was a test as to this same obedience. The pupils, who are by this time familiars of the party, had devised a boating and fishing expedition for all the enterprising, which was satisfactory to the elders because it was to include both the fathers. Unluckily, however, this morning's post brought a summons to Martyn and Mary to fulfil an engagement they have long made to meet an American professor at --, and they had to start off at eleven o'clock; and at the same time the Hollyford clergyman, an old fellow-curate of Horace Druce, sent a note imploring him to take a funeral. So the voice of the seniors was for putting off the expedition, but the voice of the juniors was quite the other way. The three families took different lines. The Druces show obedience though not respect; they growled and grumbled horribly, but submitted, though with ill grace, to the explicit prohibition. Non-interference is professedly Mary's principle, but even she said, with entreaty veiled beneath the playfulness, when it was pleaded that two of the youths had oars at Cambridge, "Freshwater fish, my dears. I wish you would wait for us! I don't want you to attend the submarine wedding of our old friends Tame and Isis." To which Pica rejoined, likewise talking out of Spenser, that Proteus would provide a nice ancient nymph to tend on them. Her father then chimed in, saying, "You will spare our nerves by keeping to dry land unless you can secure the ancient mariner who was with us yesterday."
"Come, come, most illustrious," said Pica good-humouredly, "I'm not going to encourage you to set up for nerves. You are much better without them, and I must get some medusæ."
It ended with, "I beg you will not go without that old man," the most authoritative speech I have heard either Martyn or Mary make to their daughters; but it was so much breath wasted on Pica, who maintains her right to judge for herself. The ancient mariner had been voted an encumbrance and exchanged for a jolly young waterman.
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. 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 medusæ." I am afraid it is true, as Isa says, that it was all owing to the walk with that young Mr Horne.
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. "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.
She came to propound to me a notion that has risen among these Oxford girls, namely, that I should take out their convalescent dressmaker as my maid instead of poor Amélie. She is quite well now, and going back next week; but a few years in a warm climate might be the saving of her health. So I agreed to go with Isa to look at her, and judge whether the charming account I heard was all youthful enthusiasm. Edith went out driving with my mother, and we began our tête-à-tête walk, in which I heard a great deal of the difficulties of that free-and-easy house at Oxford, and how often Isa wishes for some one who would be a real guide and helper, instead of only giving a playful, slap-dash answer, like good-natured mockery. The treatment may suit Mary's own daughters, but 'Just as you please, my dear,' is not good for sensitive, anxious spirits. We passed Jane and Avice reading together under a rock; I was much inclined to ask them to join us, but Isa was sure they were much happier undisturbed, and she was so unwilling to share me with any one that I let them alone. I was much pleased with the dressmaker, Maude Harris, who is a nice, modest, refined girl, and if the accounts I get from her employers bear out what I hear of her, I shall engage her; I shall be glad, for the niece's sake, to have that sort of young woman about the place. She speaks most warmly of what the Misses Fulford have done for her.