"I'm going to trust you," Lady Enid went on, emphasising the two
pronouns.
"Many thanks," said the Prophet, unoriginally.
She was sitting on a square piece of furniture which the Marquis of
Glome called an "Aberdeen lean-to." She now spread herself out upon it
in the easy attitude of one who is about to converse intimately for some
centuries, and proceeded.
"I daresay you know, Mr. Vivian, that people always call me a very
sensible sort of girl."
The Prophet remembered his grandmother's remark about Lady Enid.
"I know they do," he assented, trying not to think of five o'clock.
"What do they mean by that, Mr. Vivian?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"I say what do they mean by a sensible sort of girl?"
"Why, I suppose--"
"I'm going to tell you," she interrupted him. "They mean a sort of girl
who likes fresh air, washes her face with yellow soap, sports dogskin
gloves, drives in an open cart in preference to a shut brougham, enjoys
a cold tub and Whyte Melville's novels, laughs at ghosts and cries over
'Misunderstood,' considers the Bishop of London a deity and the Albert
Memorial a gem of art, would wear a neat Royal fringe in her grave, and
a straw hat and shirt on the Judgment Day if she were in the country for
it--walks with the guns, sings 'Home, Sweet Home' in the evening
after dinner to her bald-headed father, thinks the _Daily Mail_ an
intellectual paper, the Royal Academy an uplifting institution, the
British officer a demi-god with a heart of gold in a body of steel, and
the road from Calais to Paris the way to heaven.
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