"What dear wildflowers!" she murmured now, as restraining Cleopatra's coquettish gambols, she rode more slowly along, and spied the bluebells standing up among tangles of green, making exquisite contrast with the golden glow of aconites and the fragile white of wood-anemones,--"They are ever so much prettier than the hot-house things one gets any day in Paris and London! Big forced roses,--great lolling, sickly-scented lilies, and orchids--oh dear! how tired I am of orchids! Every evening a bouquet of orchids for five weeks--Sundays NOT excepted,--shall I ever forget the detestable 'rare specimens'!"
A little frown puckered her brow, and for a moment the lines of her pretty mouth drooped and pouted with a quaintly petulant expression, like that of a child going to cry.
"It was complete persecution!" she went on, crooning her complaints to herself and patting Cleopatra's arched neck by way of accompaniment to her thoughts--"Absolute dodging and spying round corners after the style of a police detective. I just hate a lover who makes his love, if it is love, into a kind of whip to flog your poor soul with! Roxmouth here, Roxmouth there, Roxmouth everywhere!- -he was just like the water in the Ancient Mariner 'and not a drop to drink.' At the play, at the Opera, in the picture-galleries, at the races, at the flower-shows, at all the 'crushes' and big functions,--in London, in Paris, in New York, in St. Petersburg, in Vienna,--always 'ce cher Roxmouth'--as Aunt Emily said;--money no consideration, distance no object,--always 'ce cher Roxmouth,' stiff as a poker, clean as fresh paint, and apparently as virtuous as an old maid,--with all his aristocratic family looming behind him, and a long ancestry of ghosts in the shadow of time, extending away back to some Saxon 'nobles,' who no doubt were coarse barbarians that ate more raw meat than was good for them, and had to be carried to bed dead drunk on mead! It IS so absurd to boast of one's ancestry! If we could only just see the dreadful men who began all the great families, we should be perfectly ashamed of them! Most of them tore up their food with their fingers. Now we Vancourts are supposed to be descended from a warrior bold, named Robert Priaulx de Vaignecourt, who fought in the Crusades. Poor Uncle Fred used to be so proud of that! He was always talking about it, especially when we were in America. He liked to try and make the Pilgrim-Father- families jealous. Just as he used to boast that if he had only been born three minutes before my father, instead of three minutes after, he would have been the owner of Abbot's Manor. That three minutes' delay and consideration he took about coming into the world made him the youngest twin, and cut off his chances. And he told me that Robert the Crusader had a brother named Osmond, who was believed to have founded a monastery somewhere in this neighbourhood, and who died, so the story goes, during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, though there's no authentic trace left of either Osmond or Robert anywhere. They might, of course, have been very decent and agreeable men,--but it's rather doubtful. If Osmond went on a pilgrimage he would never have washed himself, to begin with,--it would have destroyed his sanctity. And as for Robert the warrior bold, he would have been dreadfully fierce and hairy,--and I'm quite sure I could not possibly have asked him to dinner!"