‘You seem to go at your work with a good deal less vigour, Daphne,’ said Edgar, seated at his lady’s feet, on a carpet of fir-needles, his knees drawn up to his chin, clad in light-gray alpaca, and a Panama hat on the back of his head—a cool but not especially becoming costume. Mr. Turchill was not one of those few men who look well in unconventional clothes. ‘The weather is too warm for industry.’ ‘I’m afraid those curtains will never be finished.’ ‘Oh yes, they will!’ said Daphne, ‘I mean to persevere. I may be a very old woman by the time they are done, but I am not going to give in. Lina says my life is a thing of shreds and patches. I will show her that I am not to be daunted by the stupendousness of a task. Three hundred and fifty-one and a quarter sunflowers still to be done. Doesn’t it rather remind you of that type of the everlasting—a rock against which a bird scrapes its beak once in a thousand years, and when the bird has worn away the whole rock, time will come to an end? Please go on with “Luria,” and try to be a little more dramatic and a little less monotonous.’ ‘I am a wretched reader,’ said Edgar apologetically, as he looked for his place; ‘but I think I might read a shade better if I understood what I was reading. Browning is rather obscure.’ ‘I’m afraid you have not a poetic mind. You didn’t seem to understand much of “Atalanta in Calydon,” which you so kindly read to us yesterday.’ ‘I’m afraid I didn’t,’ confessed the Squire of Hawksyard, with praiseworthy meekness. ‘Modern poetry is rather difficult. I can always understand Shakespeare, and Pope, and Crabbe, and Byron, but I own that even Wordsworth is beyond me. His meaning is pretty clear, but I can’t discover his beauties.’ ‘Simply because your intellectual growth was allowed to stop when you left Rugby. But I insist upon you learning to appreciate Tennyson and Browning; so please go on with “Luria.”’ ‘In my opinion, Daphne,’ remarked Aunt Rhoda, with an oracular air, ‘it would have been much better for the balance of your mind if you had read a great deal more prose and a great deal less poetry. Good solid reading of a thoroughly useful kind would have taught you to think properly, and to express yourself carefully, instead of perpetually startling people by giving utterance to the wildest ideas.’ ‘I think I speak as the birds sing,’ answered Daphne, ‘because I can’t help it.’ ‘The habit of sober thought is a valuable one, which I hope you will acquire by-and-by, when you are mistress of a household; or else I am sorry for your future husband.’ ‘Please don’t be sorry for me, Mrs. Ferrers,’ protested Edgar, reddening angrily, as he always did at any slight to Daphne; ‘I am so perfectly contented with my fate that it would be a waste of power to pity me.’ ‘It is early days yet,’ sighed Aunt Rhoda. ‘But I live in the hope that Daphne will steady and tone down before she becomes a wife.’