"Softly, softly," put in Mrs. O'Donovan Florence. "Not a drop
of coffee for me. An orange-sherbet, if you please. Coffee
was a figure of speech--a generic term for light refreshments."
Peter laughed, and amended his order.
"Do you see those three innocent darlings playing together,
under the eye of their governess, by the Wellingtonia yonder?"
enquired the lady.
"The little girl in white and the two boys?" asked Peter.
"Precisely," said she. "Such as they are, they're me own."
"Really?" he responded, in the tone of profound and sympathetic
interest we are apt to affect when parents begin about their
children.
"I give you my word for it," she assured him. "But I mention
the fact, not in a spirit of boastfulness, but merely to show
you that I 'm not entirely alone and unprotected. There's an
American at our hotel, by the bye, who goes up and down telling
every one who'll listen that it ought to be Washingtonia, and
declaiming with tears in his eyes against the arrogance of the
English in changing Washington to Wellington. As he's a
respectable-looking man with grown-up daughters, I should think
very likely he's right."
"Very likely," said Peter. "It's an American tree, is n't it?"
"Whether it is n't or whether it is," said she, "one thing is
undeniable: you English are the coldest-blooded animals south
of the Arctic Circle."
"Oh--? Are we?" he doubted.
"You are that," she affirmed, with sorrowing emphasis.
"Ah, well," he reflected, "the temperature of our blood does
n't matter. We're, at any rate, notoriously warm-hearted."
"Are you indeed?" she exclaimed. "If you are, it's a mighty
quiet kind of notoriety, let me tell you, and a mighty cold
kind of warmth."
Peter laughed.
"You're all for prudence and expediency. You're the slaves of
your reason. You're dominated by the head, not by the heart.
You're little better than calculating-machines. Are you ever
known, now, for instance, to risk earth and heaven, and all
things between them, on a sudden unthinking impulse?"
"Not often, I daresay," he admitted.
"And you sit there as serene as a brazen statue, and own it
without a quaver," she reproached him.
"Surely," he urged, "in my character of Englishman, it behooves
me to appear smug and self-satisfied?"
"You're right," she agreed. "I wonder," she continued, after a
moment's pause, during which her eyes looked thoughtful, "I
wonder whether you would fall upon and annihilate a person who
should venture to offer you a word of well-meant advice."