The Little Lady of the Big House / Маленькая хозяйка большого дома. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“Oh, well, if I am expected to, I suppose I must,” Graham sighed. “But just the same I hate to do whatever everybody does just because everybody does it. But if it’s the custom – well, it’s the custom, that’s all. But it’s mighty hard on one with so many other nice girls around.”

There was a quizzical light in his long gray eyes that affected Ernestine so profoundly that she gazed into his eyes over long, became conscious of what she was doing, dropped her own eyes away, and flushed.

“Little Leo – the boy poet you remember last night,” she rattled on in a patent attempt to escape from her confusion. “He’s madly in love with Paula, too. I’ve heard Aaron Hancock chafing him about some sonnet cycle, and it isn’t difficult to guess the inspiration[218]. And Terrence – the Irishman, you know – he’s mildly in love with her. They can’t help it, you see; and can you blame them?”

“She surely deserves it all,” Graham murmured, although vaguely hurt in that the addle-pated, alphabet-obsessed, epicurean anarchist of an Irishman who gloried in being a loafer and a pensioner should even mildly be in love with the Little Lady. “She is most deserving of all men’s admiration,” he continued smoothly. “From the little I’ve seen of her she’s quite remarkable and most charming.”

“She’s my half-sister,” Ernestine vouchsafed, “although you wouldn’t dream a drop of the same blood ran in our veins. She’s so different. She’s different from all the Destens, from any girl I ever knew – though she isn’t exactly a girl. She’s thirty-eight, you know —”

“Pussy, pussy,” Graham whispered.

The pretty young blonde looked at him in surprise and bewilderment, taken aback by the apparent irrelevance of his interruption.

“Cat,” he censured in mock reproof.

“Oh!” she cried. “I never meant it that way. You will find we are very frank here. Everybody knows Paula’s age. She tells it herself. I’m eighteen – so, there. And now, just for your meanness, how old are you?”

“As old as Dick,” he replied promptly.

“And he’s forty,” she laughed triumphantly. “Are you coming swimming? – the water will be dreadfully cold.”

Graham shook his head. “I’m going riding with Dick.”

Her face fell with all the ingenuousness of eighteen.

“Oh,” she protested, “some of his eternal green manures, or hillside terracing, or water-pocketing.”

“But he said something about swimming at five.”

Her face brightened joyously.

“Then we’ll meet at the tank. It must be the same party.

Paula said swimming at five.”

As they parted under a long arcade, where his way led to the tower room for a change into riding clothes, she stopped suddenly and called:

“Oh, Mr. Graham.”

He turned obediently.

“You really are not compelled[219] to fall in love with Paula, you know. It was just my way of putting it.”

“I shall be very, very careful,” he said solemnly, although there was a twinkle in his eye as he concluded.

Nevertheless, as he went on to his room, he could not but admit to himself that the Paula Forrest charm, or the far fairy tentacles of it, had already reached him and were wrapping around him. He knew, right there, that he would prefer the engagement to ride to have been with her than with his old-time friend, Dick.

As he emerged from the house to the long hitching-rails under the ancient oaks, he looked eagerly for his hostess. Only Dick was there, and the stable-man, although the many saddled horses that stamped in the shade promised possibilities. But Dick and he rode away alone. Dick pointed out her horse, an alert bay thoroughbred, stallion at that, under a small Australian saddle with steel stirrups, and double-reined and single-bitted.

“I don’t know her plans,” he said. “She hasn’t shown up yet, but at any rate she’ll be swimming later. We’ll meet her then.”

Graham appreciated and enjoyed the ride, although more than once[220] he found himself glancing at his wristwatch to ascertain how far away five o’clock might yet be. Lambing time was at hand, and through home field after home field he rode with his host, now one and now the other dismounting to turn over onto its feet rotund and glorious Shropshire and Ramboullet-Merino ewes so hopelessly the product of man’s selection as to be unable to get off, of themselves, from their own broad backs, once they were down with their four legs helplessly sky-aspiring.

“I’ve really worked to make the American Merino,” Dick was saying; “to give it the developed leg, the strong back, the well-sprung rib, and the stamina. The old-country breed lacked the stamina. It was too much hand-reared and manicured.”

“You’re doing things, big things,” Graham assured him. “Think of shipping rams to Idaho! That speaks for itself.”

Dick Forrest’s eyes were sparkling, as he replied: