"No-o; ye-es," breathed Lady Pollacke, and many heads nodded in discreet accord.
"Doesn't--er--perhaps, Mrs Browning dwell rather assiduously on the tragic side of life?" Mr Crimble ventured to inquire.
Lady Pollacke jerked her head, either in the affirmative or in the negative, and looked inquiringly at Mrs Monnerie, who merely drooped her eyes a little closer towards me and smiled, almost as if she and I were in a little plot together.
"Well, Mrs Monnerie," I replied a little nervously, for all eyes were turned on me, "I don't think I know myself what _exactly_ the poem means--the who's and what's--and what the blast was which was not wind. But I thought it was a poem which every one would understand as much as _possible_ of."
To judge from the way she quivered in her chair, though quite inaudibly, Mrs Monnerie was extremely amused at this criticism.
"Well, yes," said I, "you see, when one is listening to poetry, not reading it to oneself, I mean, one hasn't time to pry about for all its bits of meaning, but only just to get the general--general--"
The silence that hung over this little exchange was growing more and more dense. Luckless Miss M.! She only plunged herself deeper into it by her reply that, "Oh, there's nothing very much in the moral, Mrs Monnerie. That's quite ordinary. At least I read about that in _prose_, why, before I was seven!"
"Touch--" began that further voice, but was silenced by a testy lift of Mrs Monnerie's eyelid. "Indeed!" she said, "and couldn't you, wouldn't you, now, give me the prose version? That's more my mark."
"It was in a little nursery lesson-book of mine, called _The Observing Eye_; letters about snails and coral insects and spiders and things----" I paused. "A book, rather, you know, for Sundays. But my--my family and I----"
"Oh, but do," cried Lady Pollacke in a voice I should hardly have recognized, "I _adore_ snails."
Once more I was cornered. So I steeled myself anew, and stumbled through the brief passage in the squat, blue book. It tells how,--
"The history of each one of the animals we have now considered, teaches us that our kind God watches over the wants and the pleasures of the meanest of His creatures. We see that He gives to them, not only the sagacity and the instruments which they need for catching their food, but that He also provides them with some means of defending themselves. We learn by their history that the gracious Eye watches under the mighty waters, as well as over the earth, and that no creature can stop doing His will without His eye seeing it."