She was recounting her experiences with a modesty that
had already won all hearts. The rest of us, she had explained, had
preferred walking, and would arrive later. She was evidently pleased
to see me, and volunteered the information that the greys, to all
seeming, had enjoyed their gallop.
I sent Dick back to break the good news to his mother. Young Bute
said he would go too. He said he was fresher than Dick, and would
get there first. As a matter of history he did, and was immediately
sorry that he had.
This is not a well-ordered world, or it would not be our good deeds
that would so often get us into trouble. Robina's insistence on our
walking up the hill had been prompted by tender feeling for dumb
animals: a virtuous emotion that surely the angels should have
blessed. The result had been to bring down upon her suffering and
reproach. It is not often that Ethelbertha loses her temper. When
she does she makes use of the occasion to perform what one might
describe as a mental spring-cleaning. All loose odds and ends of
temper that may be lying about in her mind--any scrap of indignation
that has been reposing peacefully, half forgotten, in a corner of her
brain, she ferrets out and brushes into the general heap. Small
annoyances of the year before last--little things she hadn't noticed
at the time--incidents in your past life that, so far as you are
concerned, present themselves as dim visions connected maybe with
some previous existence, she whisks triumphantly into her pan.
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