Kitabı oku: «A Bride from the Bush», sayfa 4
CHAPTER VII
IN RICHMOND PARK
The day after Mr Travers dined at Twickenham was almost the first day that passed without the happy pair running up to London together.
‘It’s far too hot to think of town, or of wearing anything but flannels all day,’ said Alfred in the morning. ‘But there’s plenty to see hereabouts, Gladdie. There’s Bushey Park and Hampton Court, and Kew Gardens, and Richmond Park. What do you say to a stroll in Richmond Park? It’s as near as anything, and we shall certainly get most air there.’
Gladys answered promptly that she was ‘on’ (they were alone); and they set out while the early haze of a sweltering day was hanging closely over all the land, but closest of all about the river.
There was something almost touching in the air of serious responsibility with which these two went about their daily sight-seeing; though Granville derived the liveliest entertainment from the spectacle. The worst of guides himself, and in many respects the least well-informed of men, Alfred nevertheless had no notion of calling in the aid of a better qualified cicerone, and of falling into the rear himself to listen and learn with his wife. At the same time, the fierce importance, to his wife, of this kind of education exaggerated itself in his mind; so he secretly armed himself with ‘Baedeker,’ and managed to keep a lesson ahead of his pupil, on principles well known to all who have ever dabbled in the noble art of ‘tutoring.’ But, indeed, Alfred’s whole conduct towards his wife was touching – touching in its perpetual tenderness, touching in its unflagging consideration, and ten times touching in the fact that his devotion was no longer blind. His eyes had been slowly and painfully opened during this first week at home. Peculiar manners, which, out there in the Bush, had not been peculiar, seemed worse than that here in England. They had to bear continual comparison with the soft speech and gentle ways of Lady Bligh, and the contrast was sharp and cruel. But the more Alfred realised his wife’s defects the more he loved her. That was the nature of his simple heart and its simple love. At least she should not know that he saw her in a different light, and at first he would have cut his tongue out rather than tell her plainly of her peculiarities. Presently she would see them for herself, and then, in her own good time, she would rub down of her own accord the sharper angles; and then she would take Lady Bligh for her model, instinctively, without being told to do so: and so all would be well. Arguing thus, Alfred had not allowed her to say a word to him about that escapade with the stock-whip on the first morning, for her penitence was grievous to him – and was it a thing in the least likely to happen twice? Nevertheless, he was thoroughly miserable in a week – that electioneering conversation was the finisher – and at last he had determined to speak. Thus the walk to Richmond was strangely silent, for all the time he was casting about for some way of expressing what was in his mind, without either wounding her feelings or letting her see that his own were sore.
Now they walked to Richmond by the river, and then over the bridge, but, before they climbed the hill to the park gates, a solemn ceremony, insisted upon by Alfred, was duly observed: the Bride ate a ‘Maid-of-Honour’ in the Original Shop; and when the famous delicacy had been despatched and criticised, and Alfred had given a wild and stumbling account of its historic origin, his wife led the way back into the sunshine in such high spirits that his own dejection deepened sensibly as the burden of his unuttered remonstrances increased. At last, in despair, he resolved to hold his tongue, for that morning at least. Then, indeed, they chatted cheerfully together for the first time during the walk, and he was partly with her in her abuse of the narrow streets and pavements of Richmond, but still stuck up for them on the plea that they were quaint and thoroughly English; whereat she laughed him to scorn; and so they reached the park.
But no sooner was the soft cool grass under their dusty feet, and the upland swelling before them as far as the eye could travel, than the Bride became suddenly and unaccountably silent. Alfred stole curious glances as he walked at her side, and it seemed to him that the dark eyes roving so eagerly over the landscape were grown wistful and sad.
‘How like it is to the old place!’ she exclaimed at last.
‘You don’t mean your father’s run, Gladdie?’
‘Yes, I do; this reminds me of it more than anything I’ve seen yet.’
‘What nonsense, my darling!’ said Alfred, laughing. ‘Why, there is no such green spot as this in all Australia!’
‘Ah! you were there in the drought, you see; you never saw the run after decent rains. If you had, you’d soon see the likeness between those big paddocks in what we call the “C Block” and this. But the road spoils this place; it wants a Bush road; let’s get off it for a bit.’
So they bore inward, to the left, and Gladys was too thoroughly charmed, and too thoughtful, to say much. And now the cool bracken was higher than their knees, and the sun beat upon their backs very fiercely; and now they walked upon turf like velvet, in the shadow of the trees.
‘You don’t get many trees like these out there,’ said Alfred.
‘Well – not in Riverina, I know we don’t,’ Gladys reluctantly admitted; and soon she added: ‘Nor any water-holes like this.’
For they found themselves on the margin of the largest of the Pen Ponds. There was no wind, not a ripple could be seen upon the whole expanse of the water. The fierce sun was still mellowed by a thin, gauzy haze, and the rays were diffused over the pond in a solid gleam. The trees on the far side showed fairly distinct outlines, filled in with a bluish smoky gray, and entirely without detail. The day was sufficiently sultry, even for the Thames Valley.
‘And yet,’ continued Gladys, speaking slowly and thoughtfully, ‘it does remind one of the Bush, somehow. I have sometimes brought a mob of sheep through the scrub to the water, in the middle of the day, and the water has looked just like this – like a great big lump of quicksilver pressed into the ground and shaved off level. That’d be on the hot still days, something like to-day. We now and then did have a day like this, you know – only, of course, a jolly sight hotter. But we had more days with the hot wind, hot and strong; what terrors they were when you were driving sheep!’
‘You were a tremendous stock-rider, Gladdie!’ remarked her husband.
‘Wasn’t I just! Ever since I was that high! And I was fond, like, of that old run – knew every inch of it better than any man on the place – except the old man, and perhaps Daft Larry. Knew it, bless you! from sunrise – you remember the sunrise out there, dull, and red, and sudden – to sundown, when you spotted the station pines black as ink against the bit of pink sky, as you came back from mustering. Let’s see – I forget how it goes – no, it’s like this: —
‘’Twas merry ’mid the black-woods when we spied the station roofs,
To wheel the wild scrub cattle at the yard,
With a running fire of stock-whips and a fiery run of hoofs,
Oh, the hardest day was never then too hard!
That’s how it goes, I think. We used sometimes to remember it as we rode home, dog-tired. But it was sheep with us, not cattle, more’s the pity. Why, what’s wrong, Alfred? Have you seen a ghost?’
‘No. But you fairly amaze me, darling. I’d no idea you knew any poetry. What is it?’
‘Gordon – mean to say you’ve never heard of him? Adam Lindsay Gordon! You must have heard of him, out there. Everybody knows him in the Bush. Why, I’ve heard shearers, and hawkers, and swagmen spouting him by the yard! He was our Australian poet, and you never had one to beat him. Father says so. Father says he is as good as Shakespeare.’
Alfred made no contradiction, for a simple reason: he had not listened to her last sentences; he was thinking how well she hit off the Bush, and how nicely she quoted poetry. He was silent for some minutes. Then he said earnestly: —
‘I wish, my darling, that you would sometimes talk to my mother like that!’
Gladys returned from the antipodes in a flash. ‘I shall never talk to any of your people any more about Australia!’ And, by her tone, she meant it.
‘Why not?’
‘Because they don’t like it, Alfred; I see they don’t, though I never see it so clearly as when it’s all over and too late. Yet why should they hate it so? Why should it annoy them? I’ve nothing else to talk about, and I should have thought they’d like to hear of another country. I know I liked to hear all about England from you, Alfred!’
Faint though it was, the reproach in her voice cut him to the heart. Yet his moment had come. He had decided, it is true, to say nothing at all; but then there had been no opening, and here was one such as might never come again.
‘Gladdie,’ he began, with great tenderness, ‘don’t be hurt, but I’m going to tell you what may have something to do with it. You know, you are apt to get – I won’t say excited – but perhaps a little too enthusiastic, when you talk of the Bush. Quite right – and no wonder, I say – but then, here in England, somehow, they very seldom seem to get enthusiastic. Then, again – I think – perhaps – you say things that are all right out there, but sound odd in our ridiculous ears. For we are an abominable, insular nation of humbugs – ’ began poor Alfred with a tremendous burst of indignation, fearing that he had said too much, and making a floundering effort to get out of what he had said. But his wife cut him short.
The colour had mounted to her olive cheeks. Denseness, at all events, was not among her failings – when she kept calm.
She was sufficiently calm now. ‘I see what you mean, and I shall certainly say no more about Australia. “I like a man that is well-bred!” Do you remember how Daft Larry used to wag his head and say that whenever he saw you? “You’re not one of the low sort,” he used to go on; and how we did laugh! But I’ve been thinking, Alfred, that he couldn’t have said the same about me, if I’d been a man. And – and that’s at the bottom of it all!’ She smiled, but her smile was sad.
‘You are offended, Gladys?’
‘Not a bit. Only I seem to understand.’
‘You don’t understand! And that isn’t at the bottom of it!’
‘Very well, then, it isn’t. So stop frowning like that this instant. I’d no idea you looked so well when you were fierce. I shall make you fierce often now. Come, you stupid boy! I shall learn in time. How do you know I’m not learning already? Come away; we’ve had enough of the water-hole, I think.’
She took his arm, and together they struck across to Ham Gate. But Alfred was silent and moody; and the Bride knew why.
‘Dear old Alfred,’ she said at last, pressing his arm with her hand; ‘I know I shall get on well with all your people, in time.’
‘All of them, Gladdie?’
‘At any rate, all but Granville.’
‘Still not Gran! I was afraid of it.’
‘No; I shall never care much about Gran. I can’t help it, really I can’t. He is everlastingly sneering, and he thinks himself so much smarter than he is. Then he enjoys it when I make a fool of myself; I see he does; and – oh, I can’t bear him!’
A pugnacious expression came into Alfred’s face, but passed over, and left it only stern.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know his infernal manner; but, when he sneers, it’s only to show what a superior sort of fellow he is; he doesn’t mean anything by it. The truth is, I fear he’s becoming a bit of a snob; but at least he’s a far better fellow than you think; there really isn’t a better fellow going. Take my word for it, and for Heaven’s sake avoid words with him; will you promise me this much, Gladdie?’
‘Very well – though I have once or twice thought there’d be a row between us, and though I do think what he’d hear from me would do him all the good in the world. But I promise. And I promise, too, not to gas about Australia, to any of them for a whole week. So there.’
They walked on, almost in silence, until Ham Common was crossed and they had reached the middle of the delightful green. And here – with the old-fashioned houses on three sides of them, and the avenue of elms behind them and the most orthodox of village duck-ponds at their feet – Gladys stopped short, and fairly burst into raptures.
‘But,’ said Alfred, as soon as he could get a word in, which was not immediately, ‘you go on as though this was the first real, genuine English village you’d seen; whereas nothing could be more entirely and typically English than Twickenham itself.’
‘Ah, but this seems miles and miles away from Twickenham, and all the other villages round about that I’ve seen. I think I would rather live here, where it is so quiet and still, like a Bush township. I like Twickenham; but on one side there’s nothing but people going up and down in boats, and on the other side the same thing, only coaches instead of boats. And I hate the sound of those coaches, with their jingle and rattle and horn-blowing; though I shouldn’t hate it if I were on one.’
‘Would you so very much like to fizz around on a coach, then?’
‘Would I not!’ said Gladys.
The first person they saw, on getting home, was Granville, who was lounging in the little veranda where they had taken tea on the afternoon of their arrival, smoking cigarettes over a book. It was the first volume of a novel, which he was scanning for review. He seemed disposed to be agreeable.
‘Gladys,’ he said, ‘this book’s about Australia; what’s a “new chum,” please? I may as well know, as, so far, the hero’s one.’
‘A “new chum,”’ his sister-in-law answered him readily, ‘is some fellow newly out from home, who goes up the Bush; and he’s generally a fool.’
‘Thank you,’ said Granville; ‘the hero of this story answers in every particular to your definition.’
Granville went on with his skimming. On a slip of paper lying handy were the skeletons of some of the smart epigrammatic sentences with which the book would presently be pulverised. Husband and wife had gone through into the house, leaving him to his congenial task; when the Tempter, in humorous mood, put it into the head of his good friend Granville to call back the Bride for a moment’s sport.
‘I say’ – the young man assumed the air of the innocent interlocutor – ‘is it true that every one out there wears a big black beard, and a red shirt, and jack-boots and revolvers?’
‘No, it is not; who says so?’
‘Well, this fellow gives me that impression. In point of fact, it always was my impression. Isn’t it a fact, however, that most of your legislators (I meant to ask you this last night, but our friend the senator gave me no chance) – that most of your legislators are convicts?’
‘Does your book give you that impression too?’ the Bride inquired coolly.
‘No; that’s original, more or less.’
‘Then it’s wrong, altogether. But, see here, Gran: you ought to go out there.’
‘Why, pray?’
‘You remember what I said a “new chum” was?’
‘Yes; among other things a fool.’
‘Very good. You ought to go out there, because there are the makings of such a splendid “new chum” in you. You’re thrown away in England.’
Granville dropped his book and put up his eyeglass. But the Bride was gone. She had already overtaken her husband, and seized him by the arm.
‘Oh, Alfred,’ she cried, ‘I have done it! I have broken my promise! I have had words with Gran! Oh, my poor boy – I’m beginning to make you wish to goodness you’d never seen me – I feel I am!’
CHAPTER VIII
GRAN’S REVENGE
All men may be vain, but the vanity of Granville Bligh was, so to speak, of a special brand. In the bandying of words (which, after all, was his profession) his vanity was not too easily satisfied by his own performances. This made him strong in attack, through setting up a high standard, of the kind; but it left his defence somewhat weak for want of practice. His war was always within the enemy’s lines. He paid too much attention to his attack. Thus, though seldom touched by an adversary, when touched he was wounded; and, what was likely to militate against his professional chances, when wounded he was generally winged. His own skin was too thin; he had not yet learned to take without a twinge what he gave without a qualm: for a smart and aggressive young man he was simply absurdly sensitive.
But, though weaker in defence than might have been expected, Granville was no mean hand at retaliation. He neither forgot nor forgave; and he paid on old scores and new ones with the heavy interest demanded by his exorbitant vanity. Here again his vanity was very fastidious. First or last, by fair means or foul, Granville was to finish a winner. Until he did, his vanity and he were not on speaking terms.
There were occasions, of course, when he was not in a position either to riposte at once or to whet his blade and pray for the next merry meeting. Such cases occurred sometimes in court, when the bench would stand no nonsense, and brusquely said as much, if not rather more. Incredible as it may seem, however, Granville felt his impotency hardly less in the public streets, when he happened to be unusually well dressed and gutter-chaff rose to the occasion. In fact, probably the worst half-hour he ever spent in his life was one fine morning when unaccountable energy actuated him to walk to Richmond, and take the train there, instead of getting in at Twickenham; for, encountering a motley and interminable string of vehicles en route to Kempton Park, he ran a gauntlet of plebeian satire during that half-hour, such as he never entirely could forget.
To these abominable experiences, the Bride’s piece of rudeness unrefined (which she had the bad taste to perpetrate at the very moment when he was being rude to her, but in a gentlemanlike way) was indeed a mere trifle; but Granville, it will now be seen, thought more of trifles than the ordinary rational animal; and this one completely altered his attitude towards Gladys.
If, hitherto, he had ridiculed her, delicately, to her face, and disparaged her – with less delicacy – behind her back, he had been merely pursuing a species of intellectual sport, without much malicious intent. He was not aware that he had ever made the poor thing uncomfortable. He had not inquired into that. He was only aware that he had more than once had his joke out of her, and enjoyed it, and felt pleased with himself. But his sentiment towards her was no longer so devoid of animosity. She had scored off him; he had felt it sufficiently at the moment; but he felt it much more when it had rankled a little. And he despised and detested himself for having been scored off, even without witnesses, by a creature so coarse and contemptible. He was too vain to satisfy himself with the comfortable, elastic, and deservedly popular principle that certain unpleasantnesses and certain unpleasant people are ‘beneath notice.’ Nobody was beneath Granville’s notice; he would have punished with his own boot the young blackguards of the gutter, could he have been sure of catching them, and equally sure of not being seen; and he punished Gladys in a fashion that precluded detection – even Gladys herself never knew that she was under the lash.
On the contrary, she ceased to dislike her brother-in-law. He was become more polite to her than he had ever been before; more affable and friendly in every way. Quite suddenly, they were brother and sister together.
‘How well those two get on!’ Lady Bligh would whisper to her husband, during the solemn game of bezique which was an institution of their quieter evenings; and, indeed, the Bride and her brother-in-law had taken to talking and laughing a good deal in the twilight by the open window. But, sooner or later, Granville was sure to come over to the card-table with Gladys’s latest story or saying, with which he would appear to be hugely amused: and the same he delighted to repeat in its original vernacular, and with its original slips of grammar, but with his own faultless accent – which emphasised those peculiarities, making Lady Bligh sigh sadly and Sir James look as though he did not hear. And Alfred was too well pleased that his wife had come to like Granville at last, to listen to what they were talking about; and the poor girl herself never once suspected the unkindness; far from it, indeed, for she liked Granville now.
‘I thought he would never forgive me for giving him that bit of my mind the other day; but you see, Alfred, it did him good; and now I like him better than I ever thought possible in this world. He’s awfully good to me. And we take an interest in the same sort of things. Didn’t you hear how interested he was in Bella’s sweetheart at lunch to-day?’
Alfred turned away from the fresh bright face that was raised to his. He could not repress a frown.
‘I do wish you wouldn’t call the girl Bella,’ he said, with some irritation. ‘Her name’s Bunn. Why don’t you call her Bunn, dear? And nobody dreams of making talk about their maids’ affairs, let alone their maids’ young men, at the table. It’s not the custom – not in England.’
A week ago he would not have remonstrated with her upon so small a matter; but the ice had been broken that morning in Richmond Park. And a week ago she would very likely have told him, laughingly, to hang his English customs; but now she looked both pained and puzzled, as she begged him to explain to her the harm in what she had said.
‘Harm?’ said Alfred, more tenderly. ‘Well, there was no real harm in it – that’s the wrong word altogether – especially as we were by ourselves, without guests. Still, you know, the mother doesn’t want to hear all about her servants’ family affairs, and what her servants’ sweethearts are doing in Australia, or anywhere else. All that – particularly when you talk of the woman by her Christian name – sounds very much – why, it sounds almost as though you made a personal friend of the girl, Gladdie!’
Gladys opened wide her lovely eyes. ‘Why, so I do!’
Alfred looked uncomfortable.
‘So I do!’ said the Bride again. ‘And why not, pray? There, you see, you know of no reason why I shouldn’t be friends with her, you goose! But I won’t speak of her any more as Bella, if you don’t like – except to her face. I shall call her what I please to her face, sir! But, indeed, I wouldn’t have spoken about her at all to-day, only I was interested to know her young man was out there; and Gran seemed as interested as me, for he went on asking questions – ’
Alfred was quite himself again.
‘Any way, darling,’ he said, interrupting her with a kiss, ‘I am glad you have got over your prejudice against Gran!’ – and he went out, looking it; but leaving behind him less of gladness than he carried away.
The conversation had taken place in the little morning-room in the front of the house, which faced the west; and the strong afternoon sunshine, striking down through the trembling tree-tops, dappled the Bride’s face with lights and shadows. It was not, at the moment, a very happy face. All the reckless, radiant, aggressive independence of two or three weeks ago was gone out of it. The bold, direct glance was somewhat less bold. The dark, lustrous, lovely eyes were become strangely wistful. Gladys was in trouble.
It had crept upon her by slow degrees. Shade by shade the fatal truth had dawned even upon her – the fatal disparity between herself and her new relatives. This was plainer to no one now than to the Bride herself; and to her the disparity meant despair – it was so wide – and it grew wider day by day, as her realisation of it became complete. Well, she had made friends with Granville: but that was all. The Judge had been distant and ceremonious from the first: he was distant and ceremonious still. He had never again unbent so much as at that tragic moment when he bade her rise from her knees in the wet stable-yard. As for Lady Bligh, she had begun by being kind enough; but her kindness had run to silent sadness. She seemed full of regrets. Gladys was as far from her as ever. And Gladys knew the reasons for all this – some of them. She saw, now, the most conspicuous among her own shortcomings; and against those that she did see (Heaven knows) she struggled strenuously. But there were many she could not see, yet; she felt this, vaguely; and it was this that filled her with despair.
It was green grass that she gazed out upon from the morning-room window, as the trouble deepened in her eyes; and in Australia she had seldom seen grass that was green. But just then she would have given all the meadows of England for one strip of dry saltbush plain, with the sun dropping down behind the far-away line of sombre, low-sized scrub, and the sand-hills flushing in the blood-red light, and the cool evening wind coming up from the south. The picture was very real to her – as real, for the moment, as this shaven grass-plot, and the line of tall trees that shadowed it, with their trunks indistinguishable, in this light, against the old brick wall. Then she sighed, and the vision vanished – and she thought of Alfred.
‘He can’t go on loving me always, unless I improve,’ she said dismally. ‘I must get more like his own people, and get on better with them, and all that. I must! Yet he doesn’t tell me how to set to work; and it’s hard to find out for oneself. I am trying; but it’s very hard. If only somebody would show me how! For, unless I find out, he can’t care about me much longer – I see it – he can’t!’
Yet it seemed that he did.
If attending to the most extravagant wish most lightly spoken counts for anything, Alfred could certainly care for his wife still, and did care for her very dearly indeed. And that wish that Gladys had expressed while walking through the village of Ham – the desire to drive about in a coach-and-four – had been at least lightly uttered, and had never since crossed her mind, very possibly. Nevertheless, one day in the second week of June the coach-and-four turned up – spick and span, and startling and fairylike as Cinderella’s famous vehicle. It was Alfred’s surprise; he had got the coach for the rest of the season; and when he saw that his wife could find no words to thank him – but could only gaze at him in silence, with her lovely eyes grown soft and melting, and his hand pressed in hers – then, most likely, the honest fellow experienced a purer joy than he had ever known in all his life before. Nor did the surprise end there. By collusion with Lady Bligh and Granville, a strong party had been secretly convened for Ascot the very next day; and a charming dress, which Gladys had never ordered, came down from her dressmaker in Conduit Street that evening – when Alfred confessed, and was hugged. And thus, just as she was getting low and miserable and self-conscious, Gladys was carried off her feet and whirled without warning into a state of immense excitement.
Perhaps she could not have expressed her gratitude more eloquently than she did but a minute before they all drove off in the glorious June morning; when, getting her husband to herself for one moment, she flung her arms about his neck and whispered tenderly: —
‘I’m going to be as good as gold all day – it’s the least I can do, darling!’
And she was no worse than her word. The racing interested her vastly – she won a couple of sweepstakes too, by the way – yet all day she curbed her wild excitement with complete success. Only her dark eyes sparkled so that people declared they had never seen a woman so handsome, and in appearance so animated, who proved to have so little – so appallingly little – to say for herself. And it was Gladys herself who drove them all home again, handling the ribbons as no other woman handled them that season, and cracking her whip as very few men could crack one, so that it was heard for half a mile through the clear evening air, while for half that distance people twisted their necks and strained their eyes to see the last of the dark, bewitching, dashing driver who threaded her way with such nerve and skill through the moving maze of wheels and horseflesh that choked the country roads.
And, with it all, she kept her promise to the letter. And her husband was no less delighted than proud. And only her brother-in-law felt aggrieved.
‘But it’s too good to last,’ was that young man’s constant consolation. ‘It’s a record, so far; but she’ll break out before the day is over; she’ll entertain us yet – or I’ll know the reason why!’ he may have added in his most secret soul. At all events, as he sat next her at dinner, when the Lady Lettice Dunlop – his right-hand neighbour – remarked in a whisper the Bride’s silence, Granville was particularly prompt to whisper back: —
‘Try her about Australia. Sound her on the comparative merits of their races out there and Ascot. Talk in front of me, if you like; I don’t mind; and she’ll like it.’
So Lady Lettice Dunlop leant over gracefully, and said she had heard of a race called the Melbourne Cup; and how did it compare with the Gold Cup at Ascot?
The Bride shook her head conclusively, and a quick light came into her eyes. ‘There is no comparison.’
‘You mean, of course, that your race does not compare with ours? Well, it hardly would, you know!’ Lady Lettice smiled compassionately.
‘Not a bit of it!’ was the brusque and astonishing retort. ‘I mean that the Melbourne Cup knocks spots – I mean to say, is ten thousand times better than what we saw to-day!’
The Lady Lettice sat upright again and manipulated her fan. And it was Granville’s opening.
‘I can quite believe it,’ chimed in Gran. ‘I always did hear that that race of yours was the race of the world. Englishmen say so who have been out there, Lady Lettice. But you should tell us wherein the superiority lies, Gladys.’
The Bride complied with alacrity.
‘Why, the course is ever so much nicer; there are ever so many more people, but ever so much less crowding; the management of everything is ever so much better; and the dresses are gayer —ever so much!’
‘Ever so much’ was a recent reform suggested by Alfred. It was an undoubted improvement upon ‘a jolly sight,’ which it replaced; but, like most reforms, it was apt to be too much en evidence just at first.
