A Damsel in Distress

"Now, wouldn't you like to be able to write a wonderful thing like

that, Albert?"

"Not me, m'lady."

"You wouldn't like to be a poet when you grow up?"

Albert shook his golden head.

"I want to be a butcher when I grow up, m'lady."

Maud uttered a little cry.

"A butcher?"

"Yus, m'lady. Butchers earn good money," he said, a light of

enthusiasm in his blue eyes, for he was now on his favourite

subject. "You've got to 'ave meat, yer see, m'lady. It ain't like

poetry, m'lady, which no one wants."

"But, Albert," cried Maud faintly. "Killing poor animals. Surely

you wouldn't like that?"

Albert's eyes glowed softly, as might an acolyte's at the sight of

the censer.

"Mr. Widgeon down at the 'ome farm," he murmured reverently, "he

says, if I'm a good boy, 'e'll let me watch 'im kill a pig

Toosday."

He gazed out over the water-lilies, his thoughts far away. Maud

shuddered. She wondered if medieval pages were ever quite as earthy

as this.

"Perhaps you had better go now, Albert. They may be needing you in

the house."

"Very good, m'lady."

Albert rose, not unwilling to call it a day. He was conscious of

the need for a quiet cigarette. He was fond of Maud, but a man

can't spend all his time with the women.

"Pigs squeal like billy-o, m'lady!" he observed by way of adding a

parting treasure to Maud's stock of general knowledge. "Oo! 'Ear

'em a mile orf, you can!"

Maud remained where she was, thinking, a wistful figure.

Tennyson's "Mariana" always made her wistful even when rendered by

Albert. In the occasional moods of sentimental depression which

came to vary her normal cheerfulness, it seemed to her that the

poem might have been written with a prophetic eye to her special

case, so nearly did it crystallize in magic words her own story.

"With blackest moss the flower-pots

Were thickly crusted, one and all."

Well, no, not that particular part, perhaps. If he had found so

much as one flower-pot of his even thinly crusted with any foreign

substance, Lord Marshmoreton would have gone through the place like

an east wind, dismissing gardeners and under-gardeners with every

breath. But-"She only said 'My life is dreary,

He cometh not,' she said.

She said 'I am aweary, aweary.

I would that I were dead!"

How exactly--at these moments when she was not out on the links

picking them off the turf with a midiron or engaged in one of those

other healthful sports which tend to take the mind off its

troubles--those words summed up her case.