Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth/Volume 2/Letter 7
What did he say? I expressed my opinion that such performances were unworthy of respectable patronage; but he replied: “Oh, it was only ‘for one night only.’ I had a fit of the blues come on, and thought I would go to see Polly Presswell, England’s Particular Spark.” I told him I was proud to say I had never heard of her. I say. I’ve got it! He’s got to pop the question before lunch or look for another father. I once asked Smith to keep a secret of mine, and the poor old fellow was so much afraid of losing it that in a few hours he had got everybody in the station helping him to keep it. They would not stretch out; they would keep going round and round as if they were on the treadles of a wheel, so that he made the smallest steps conceivable. And the customer Mr. Hoopdriver was going to serve was the Young Lady in Grey. He’s shy of me and he’s too brainy for Tony and Algie; and as to letting him play golf with Dinah, I’m hanged if he’s going to! Nature has given Tony quite enough to contend with.
No woman who knew poor Tony could ever conceivably marry him. Yes. Isn’t it charming of Tony? Why don’t you get hold of Algie and have a game of billiards, or try the golf course? And what’s a proper summer home and hunting lodge without an icehouse that facilitates turn-of-the-century entertaining, a library to hang the heads of your game trophies, and of course, secret passageways and a dungeon? When setting up a game of billiards, the first step is to rack the balls in the triangular rack, with the 1-ball at the top and the 8-ball in the center. Each player is trying to hit in either all of the striped or solid balls. The last player standing wins the bowl of candy. I know what you’d have. It must have fallen off. I mean,” he replied, “that he must bag her before she finds him out. They might make him a K.C.B., it is true; but he does not belong to the Simla Band of Hope, and stars must not be allowed to shoot madly from their sphere.
The adversary plays to knock that disk out and leave his own in its place-particularly if it rests upon the 9 or 10 or some other of the high numbers; but if it rests in the “10-off” he backs it up-lands his disk behind it a foot or two, to make it difficult for its owner to knock it out of that damaging place and improve his record. In doing so, you make it much harder for an attacker to overturn more than one kubb at a time, dominos style. When there are multiple field kubb in question, it’s generally best to separate them with as much horizontal space as possible. Employees can personalize their workstations as much as they like, and even bring dogs (but not cats) to work if they want to. It occurred to Mr. Hoopdriver even at the moment that this was scarcely brotherly behaviour. And as Mr. Hoopdriver began to measure faster, the other man in brown said the Young Lady in Grey had been there long enough, and that he was her brother, or else she would not be travelling with him, and he suddenly whipped his arm about her waist and made off with her.
Anon Mr. Hoopdriver found himself riding out of the darkness of non-existence, pedalling Ezekiel’s Wheels across the Weald of Surrey, jolting over the hills and smashing villages in his course, while the other man in brown cursed and swore at him and shouted to stop his career. He tried to shout and warn the town to get out of the way, but his voice was gone as well. And he honestly thought he was, too; and so he had no one to blame but himself when his voice caught on the centre occasionally, and gave him the lockjaw. She apologised for the cold of these rooms-and well she might; when the double doors were opened I really thought Eolus himself was puffing in our faces; we shawled ourselves well before we ventured in. She had then said something to her mother about Major Grantly, something ambiguous, something about his being “very nice,” and the mother had thought how great was the pity that her daughter, who was “nice” too in her estimation, should have so few of those adjuncts to assist her which come from full pockets. ‘Joe, I should like to have a photograph taken of you.
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