The lost box was announced while we were at dinner, and Jane is gone
with her faithful Avice to unpack it. Her mother would have done it
and sent her boating with the rest, but submitted as usual when
commanded to adhere to the former plan of driving with grandmamma.
These Druce children must be excellent, according to their mother,
but they are terribly brusque and bearish. They are either seen and
not heard, or not seen and heard a great deal too much. Even Jane
and Meg, who ought to know better, keep up a perpetual undercurrent
of chatter and giggle, whatever is going on, with any one who will
share it with them.
10.--I am more and more puzzled about the new reading of the Fifth
Commandment. None seem to understand it as we used to do. The
parents are content to be used as equals, and to be called by all
sorts of absurd names; and though grandmamma is always kindly and
attentively treated, there is no reverence for the relationship. I
heard Charley call her 'a jolly old party,' and Metelill respond
that she was 'a sweet old thing.' Why, we should have thought such
expressions about our grandmother a sort of sacrilege, but when I
ventured to hint as much Charley flippantly answered, "Gracious me,
we are not going back to buckram"; and Metelill, with her caressing
way, declared that she loved dear granny too much to be so stiff and
formal. I quoted--
"If I be a Father, where is My honour?"
And one of them taking it, I am sorry to say, for a line of secular
poetry, exclaimed at the stiffness and coldness. Pica then put in
her oar, and began to argue that honour must be earned, and that it
was absurd and illogical to claim it for the mere accident of
seniority or relationship. Jane, not at all conscious of being an
offender, howled at her that this was her horrible liberalism and
neology, while Metelill asked what was become of loyalty. "That
depends on what you mean by it," returned our girl graduate. "LOI-
AUTE, steadfastness to principle, is noble, but personal loyalty, to
some mere puppet or the bush the crown hangs on, is a pernicious
figment." Charley shouted that this was the No. 1 letter A point in
Pie's prize essay, and there the discussion ended, Isa only sighing
to herself, "Ah, if I had any one to be loyal to!"
"How you would jockey them!" cried Charley, turning upon her so
roughly that the tears came into her eyes; and I must have put on
what you call my Government-house look, for Charley subsided
instantly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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