"You have such a wretchedly bad opinion of me, Miss Delane."
"Then one would think you would try to change it."
"Write something I should delight in singing."
"But if it were allowed, would you allow it?"
"You know how proud any girl would be of it--of course you know."
"Do justice to yourself first, Mr. Bannister."
"Oh, anything honest, and manly, and patriotic, and--and nice in feeling."
"A catholic taste--and yet none of mine satisfy it."
"I will not be quarreled with," declared Janet.
It must be allowed that conversations of this nature have a pleasantness of their own, and Dale left the Grange with a delightful feeling of having been treated as he ought to be treated. He found Philip Hume writing and smoking in the study.
"Well, been stroked the right way, old man?" asked Philip, throwing down his pen.
Dale helped himself to whisky and soda water, without replying.
"I've been having a talk with Nellie," pursued Philip.
"She's got some notion in her head that she and her mother ought to go."
"Of course I told her it was all nonsense, and that you meant them to stay as long as they liked. She's got some maggot in her head about propriety--all nonsense, when her mother's here."
"I don't want them to go, if they like staying," said Dale.
"Well, we should be slow without Nellie, shouldn't we? You must blow her up for thinking of it. She only wants to be persuaded."
"You don't seem very enthusiastic about it, one way or the other."
"Well, my dear Phil, I can't be expected to cry at the idea of little Nellie Fane leaving us."
"Yet you made rather a point of her coming--but that was two months ago."
"Really, you might leave Nellie and me to settle it."
"Well, you don't suppose I wanted you to tell her to pack up?"
"I don't know what you want, old man," said Philip; "and I doubt if you do."
It has been contumeliously said by insolent Englishmen--a part of our population which may sometimes seem to foreign eyes as large as the whole--that you might put any other of the world's capitals, say Paris or New York, down in London, and your cabman would not be able to find it. However this may be,--and there is no need in this place either for assertions or admissions,--it is certain that you might unload a wagonful of talents in Piccadilly, and they would speedily be absorbed and leave little obvious trace of the new ingredient. Hence the advantage, for a man who does not dislike the _digito monstrari et dicier_ "_hic est_," of dwelling in small places, and hence, a cynic might suggest, the craving for quieter quarters displayed by some of our less conspicuous celebrities. It is better, says a certain authority, to reign in hell than serve in heaven; and a man may grow weary of walking unrecognized down the Strand, when he has only, to be the beheld of all beholders, to take up his residence in--perhaps it will be more prudent to say Market Denborough, and not point the finger of printed scorn at any better known resort.