'What _do_ they talk about, Charlotte?' I inquired, wishing to pacify Edward. 'You go out with them sometimes.'
[Illustration: '"_They make me walk behind, 'cos they say I'm too little, and mustn't hear_"']
'I don't know,' said poor Charlotte dolefully. 'They make me walk behind, 'cos they say I'm too little, and mustn't hear. And I _do_ want to so,' she added.
'When any lady comes to see Aunt Eliza,' said Harold, 'they both talk at once all the time. And yet each of 'em seems to hear what the other one's saying. I can't make out how they do it. Grown-up people are so clever!'
'The Curate's the funniest man,' I remarked. 'He's always saying things that have no sense in them at all, and then laughing at them as if they were jokes. Yesterday, when they asked him if he'd have some more tea, he said, "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more," and then sniggered all over. I didn't see anything funny in that. And then somebody asked him about his button-hole, and he said, "'Tis but a little faded flower," and exploded again. I thought it very stupid.'
'O _him_,' said Edward contemptuously: 'he can't help it, you know; it's a sort of way he's got. But it's these girls I can't make out. If they've anything really sensible to talk about, how is it nobody knows what it is? And if they haven't--and we know they _can't_ have, naturally--why don't they shut up their jaw? This old rabbit here--_he_ doesn't want to talk. He's got something better to do.' And Edward aimed a ginger-beer cork at the unruffled beast, who never budged.
'O but rabbits _do_ talk,' interposed Harold. 'I've watched them often in their hutch. They put their heads together and their noses go up and down, just like Selina's and the Vicarage girls'. Only of course I can't hear what they're saying.'
'Well, if they do,' said Edward unwillingly, 'I'll bet they don't talk such rot as those girls do!' Which was ungenerous, as well as unfair; for it had not yet transpired--nor has it to this day--_what_ Selina and her friends talked about.
THE advent of strangers, of whatever sort, into our circle had always been a matter of grave dubiety and suspicion. Indeed, it was generally a signal for retreat into caves and fastnesses of the earth, into unthreaded copses or remote outlying cowsheds, whence we were only to be extricated by wily nursemaids, rendered familiar by experience with our secret runs and refuges. It was not surprising, therefore, that the heroes of classic legend, when first we made their acquaintance, failed to win our entire sympathy at once. 'Confidence,' says somebody, 'is a plant of slow growth'; and these stately dark-haired demi-gods, with names hard to master and strange accoutrements, had to win a citadel already strongly garrisoned with a more familiar soldiery. Their chill foreign goddesses had no such direct appeal for us as the mocking malicious fairies and witches of the North. We missed the pleasant alliance of the animal--the fox who spread the bushiest of tails to convey us to the enchanted castle, the frog in the well, the raven who croaked advice from the tree; and--to Harold especially--it seemed entirely wrong that the hero should ever be other than the youngest brother of three. This belief, indeed, in the special fortune that ever awaited the youngest brother, as such,--the 'Borough-English' of Faëry,--had been of baleful effect on Harold, producing a certain self-conceit and perkiness that called for physical correction. But even in our admonishment we were on his side; and as we distrustfully eyed these new arrivals, old Saturn himself seemed something of a _parvenu_.