“Yes, you have grown a great deal lately, my dear. I beg your pardon. It is hard to teach an old person like myself where babyhood ends. You see, I like to think that you are a little girl. Eh, John? we like something young in the house; the younger the better--” “No me, Sir Ludovic,” said John. He was very laconic, wasting no words; and Margaret felt that he disapproved of her youth altogether. But this restored her to herself, and she laughed. For John, though morose in outward aspect, was, as she very well knew, her slave actually. This made her laugh, and the two old men liked the laugh. It brought a corresponding light into Sir Ludovic’s fine eyes, and it melted a little the morose muscles about John’s closely shut mouth. “But I am not so very young,” she said. “Jeanie’s sister, who is just my age, has been in a place for a long time; and most people are considered grown-up at my age. You ought not to make a fool of me.” “My little Peggy,” said Sir Ludovic, “that is an incorrect expression. Nobody could make a fool of you except yourself. It is Scotch, my dear, very Scotch, which is a thing your sisters Jean and Grace have already often warned me against. You are very Scotch, they tell me.” “Set them up!” ejaculated old John, under his breath. Margaret reddened with ready wrath. “And I _am_ Scotch,” she said. “How could I speak otherwise? They were always going on about something. Either it was my shoulders, or it was my hair, or it was my tongue--” “Your tongue! My Peggy, your idioms are strange, it must be allowed; but never mind. What had they to say against your hair? It is very pretty hair. I don’t see any ground to find fault there.” “Oh, it was not in the fashion,” said Margaret. “You know, papa, you like it smooth, and that is not the fashion now; it ought to be all towzy, like my little dog, and hanging in my eyes.” “The Lord preserve us!” said old John. He was in the habit of giving utterance to his sentiments as constrained by some internal movement _plus fort que lui_; and no one ever interfered with this habit of his. “What next?” said the old man, with a shrug of his shoulders behind his master’s chair. “Then you must continue to be old-fashioned so long as I live,” said Sir Ludovic. “Your sisters are very well-meaning women, my Peggy; but even when you are as clever as Mrs. Bellingham and as wise as Miss Leslie, you will not have fathomed everything. We’ll leave the philosophy to them, my little woman, and you and I will manage the hair-dressing. That is evidently the point in which our genius lies.”