“What price Grace,” he cried, “spending her spare time in reading Horace? Why, she only knows of one chap called Horace in the reading line, which his other name is Hutchinson.” “Oh, don’t I though?” said Grace. “I know the Horace father means. A fat old bounder who was always thirsty; awful fond of wine, he was, awful fond. Don’t think _he_ was ever in condition. As for his jaw, it was something frightful. Why, I’ve got a very cultivated literary taste, haven’t I, Father?” “Very,” said her parent gently. “Oh, yes, I can quite believe that the Guv’nor strokes your fur a bit,” said Archie, whose insight into the human heart was pitiless, “when he has you in on Saturday evenings and wants to persuade you to fish him a few quotations out of Bohn. We know where all the embroidery comes from, don’t we, Toddles?” “It’s not Bohn, anyhow,” said Miss Grace, “’cause the binding’s better. Hullo, what’s up with Toddles! Why, he’s choking!” It required the undivided energies of two strong men to beat the little curate on the back ere he was restored to a sense of his responsibilities. “I think,” said the old gentleman, with sly enjoyment, “that these revelations are hardly suited to the young miss. Feminine ideals, you know.” At this Miss Grace looked keenly about her on every side. “It’s all serene, Father,” said she. “There’s none o’ the maids about. Don’t think they can _possibly_ hear us.” “Laura,” said the old gentleman, hiding the most significant part of his face in a tea-cup, “I want you to confine yourself in your spare time to learning to play with a perfectly straight bat. The way in which you pull everything blindly to leg is a reproach, a disgrace to the family. You boys ought to be really ashamed of it, and it grieves me to think that Laura’s self-respect allows her to do it. I’m wondering if we had Arthur Shrewsbury down for a bit whether he’d be able to do anything for her.” “It’s her sex asserting itself,” said Archie. (It should be said at once that Archie has such an amount of psychology and kindred things in his mind that he has written a novel for the Keynotes Series.) “The eternal feminine is not to be repressed. There’s two things about Grace’s cricket that betrays the woman. One, as the Guv’nor has remarked, is her deplorable habit of playing everything with a cross bat; the other is a well-defined tendency to dispute the umpire’s decisions. Woman-like, she declines to recognise a mere man’s authority. If it were not for the fear that she’d have been defying Bob Thoms or some other potentate, and refusing to go out when he gave her ‘petticoat before,’ we might have played her for Middlesex, for her bowling and fielding all through the season.”