The Daughters of Danaus | Page 8

stay here during all the best years of my life, without prospect of widening my experience; only as a matter of fact, the world is somewhat different from anything that you imagine, and by no means would you find it all beer and skittles. Your smoke and sun-vision is not to be trusted."
"But think of the pride and joy of being able to speak in that tone of experience!" exclaimed Hadria mockingly.
"One has to pay for experience," said Ernest, shaking his head and ignoring her taunt.
"I think one has to pay more heavily for inexperience," she said.
"Not if one never comes in contact with the world. Girls are protected from the realities of life so long as they remain at home, and that is worth something after all."
Algitha snorted. "I don't know what you are pleased to call realities, my dear Ernest, but I can assure you there are plenty of unpleasant facts, in this protected life of ours."
"Nobody can expect to escape unpleasant facts," said Ernest.
"Then for heaven's sake, let us purchase with them something worth having!" Hadria cried.
"Hear, hear!" assented Algitha.
"Unpleasant facts being a foregone conclusion," Hadria added, "the point to aim at obviously is interesting facts--and plenty of them."
Ernest flicked a pebble off the parapet of the balustrade of the little temple, and watched it fall, with a silent splash, into the river.
"I never met girls before, who wanted to come out of their cotton-wool," he observed. "I thought girls loved cotton-wool. They always seem to."
"Girls seem an astonishing number of things that they are not," said Hadria, "especially to men. A poor benighted man might as well try to get on to confidential terms with the Sphinx, as to learn the real thoughts and wishes of a girl."
"You two are exceptional, you see," said Ernest.
"Oh, everybody's exceptional, if you only knew it!" exclaimed his sister. "Girls;" she went on to assert, "are stuffed with certain stereotyped sentiments from their infancy, and when that painful process is completed, intelligent philosophers come and smile upon the victims, and point to them as proofs of the intentions of Nature regarding our sex, admirable examples of the unvarying instincts of the feminine creature. In fact," Hadria added with a laugh, "it's as if the trainer of that troop of performing poodles that we saw, the other day, at Ballochcoil, were to assure the spectators that the amiable animals were inspired, from birth, by a heaven-implanted yearning to jump through hoops, and walk about on their hind legs----"
"But there are such things as natural instincts," said Ernest.
"There are such things as acquired tricks," returned Hadria.
A loud shout, accompanied by the barking of several dogs, announced the approach of the two younger boys. Boys and dogs had been taking their morning bath in the river.
"You have broken in upon a most interesting discourse," said Ernest. "Hadria was really coming out."
This led to a general uproar.
When peace was restored, the conversation went on in desultory fashion. Ernest and Hadria fell apart into a more serious talk. These two had always been "chums," from the time when they used to play at building houses of bricks on the nursery floor. There was deep and true affection between them.
The day broke into splendour, and the warm rays, rounding the edge of the eastward rock, poured straight into the little temple. Below and around on the cliff-sides, the rich foliage of holly and dwarf oak, ivy, and rowan with its burning berries, was transformed into a mass of warm colour and shining surfaces.
"What always bewilders me," Hadria said, bending over the balustrade among the ivy, "is the enormous gulf between what might be and what is in human life. Look at the world--life's most sumptuous stage--and look at life! The one, splendid, exquisite, varied, generous, rich beyond description; the other, poor, thin, dull, monotonous, niggard, distressful--is that necessary?"
"But all lives are not like that," objected Fred.
"I speak only from my own narrow experience," said Hadria.
"Oh, she is thinking, as usual, of that unfortunate Mrs. Gordon!" cried Ernest.
"Of her, and the rest of the average, typical sort of people that I know," Hadria admitted. "I wish to heaven I had a wider knowledge to speak from."
"If one is to believe what one hears and reads," said Algitha, "life must be full of sorrow indeed."
"But putting aside the big sorrows," said her sister, "the ordinary every day existence that would be called prosperous, seems to me to be dull and stupid to a tragic extent."
"The Gordons of Drumgarran once more! I confess I can't see anything particularly tragic there," observed Fred, whose memory recalled troops of stalwart young persons in flannels, engaged for hours, in sending a ball from one side of a net to the other.
"It is more than tragic; it is disgusting!" cried Hadria with a