“Oh, Felix Underwood!” said Anna. “Adrian is much more manly. You should see him ride and climb trees.”
The comparative value of brothers and cousins was very apparent. However, it was fixed that Anna should attend the Mouse-trap, and hear and contribute as she could find time.
“‘Who rideth so late in the forest so wild? It is the fond father and his loving child.’”
“Oh, spare us, Val,” cried her sister Gillian. “Every one has done that.”
“‘Who trampeth so late in a shocking bad hat? ‘Tis the tipsy old father a-hugging his brat.”
“I can’t recollect any more, but the Erl King’s daughter is a beggar-woman, and it ends with--
“I’ll give thee a tanner and make him a bait, So in the gin palace was settled his fate.”
Some of the party were scandalized, others laughed as much or more than the effusion deserved.
“We accept drawings,” added another voice, “and if any one does anything extraordinarily good in that way, or in writing, it makes a little book.”
“We have higher designs than that,” said Gillian. “We want to print the cream.”
“For the benefit of the school board--no, the board school.”
“Oh! oh! Valetta!” cried the general voice.
“The thing is,” explained Gillian, “that we must build a new school for the out-liers of St. Kenelm’s, or ‘my lords’ will be down on us, and we shall be swamped by board schools.”
“Aunt Jane is frantic about it,” said Dolores Mohun.
“There’s no escape from school board worries!” exclaimed Anna. “They helped to demolish Uncle Clement.”
“There is to be a sale of work, and a concert, and all sorts of jolly larks,” added Valetta.
“Larks aren’t slang. They are in the dictionary,” declared Valetta.
“By the bye, she has not heard the rules of the Mice,” put in Mysie.
“I’ll say them,” volunteered Valetta the irrepressible. “Members of the Mouse-trap never utter slang expressions, never wear live birds--I mean dead ones--in their hats.”
“Is an ostrich feather a live bird or a dead?” demanded Anna.
“And,” said Dolores, “what of the feather screens that the old Miss Smiths have been making all the winter-circles of pheasants’ feathers and peacocks’ eyes outside a border of drakes’ curls?”
“Oh, like ostriches they don’t count, since peacocks don’t die, and drakes and pheasants _must_,” said Gillian.