“Well, then, to employ that somewhat homely proverbial expression,” she went on, “the fat got into the fire at the Bishop’s palace. Mrs. Rawley was kind enough to write and ask us to dinner, and she added that she had heard I sang, and wouldn’t I bring some music? But nobody had ever told me that it’s bad form in England to sing well. So, after dinner, when Mrs. Rawley said, ’Now, Miss Silver, do sing us something,’ I made the incredible blunder of singing as well as I could. I sang the Erlkônig, and Madame Dornaye played the accompaniment, and we both did our very bestest, in our barefaced, Continental way. We were a little surprised, and vastly enlightened, to perceive that we’d shocked everybody. And by-and-by the Bishop’s daughters consented to sing in their turn, and then we saw the correct British style of doing it. If you don’t want to be considered rowdyish and noisy in a British drawing-room, you must sing under your breath, faintly, faintingly, as if you were afraid somebody might hear you.” “My poor dear young lady,” her cousin commiserated her, “fancy your only just discovering that. It’s one of the foundation-stones of our social constitution. If you sing with any art or with any feeling, you expose yourself to being mistaken for a paid professional.” “Another thing that’s horrified the County,” pursued Johannah, “is the circumstance that I keep no horses. I don’t like horses—except in pictures. In pictures, I admit at once, they make a very pleasant decorative motive. But in life—they’re too strong and too unintelligent; and they’re perpetually bolting. By-the-bye, please choose a good feeble jaded one, when you engage our fly. I’m devoted to donkeys, though. They’re every bit as decorative as the horse, and they’re really wise—they only baulk. I had a perfect love of a little donkey in Italy; his name was Angelo. If I decide to stay in England, I shall have a spanking team of four donkeys, with scarlet trappings and silver bells. But the County say ’Oh, you must have horses,’ and casts its eyes appealingly to heaven when I say I won’t.” “The County lacks a sense of situations,” he reflected. “It’s really a deliciously fresh one—a big country house, and not a horse in the stables.”