ways of dressing and thinking.  Whence it came that she had some of her wildest seizures of iridescent humour.  Danvers attributed the fun to her mistress’s gladness in not having pursued her bent to quit the country.  Redworth saw deeper, and was nevertheless amazed by the airy hawk-poise and pounce-down of her wit, as she ranged high and low, now capriciously generalizing, now dropping bolt upon things of passage—­the postillion jogging from rum to gin, the rustics baconly agape, the horse-kneed ostlers.  She touched them to the life in similes and phrases; and next she was aloft, derisively philosophizing, but with a comic afflatus that dispersed the sharpness of her irony in mocking laughter.  The afternoon refreshments at the inn of the county market-town, and the English idea of public hospitality, as to manner and the substance provided for wayfarers, were among the themes she made memorable to him.  She spoke of everything tolerantly, just naming it in a simple sentence, that fell with a ring and chimed:  their host’s ready acquiescence in receiving, orders, his contemptuous disclaimer of stuff he did not keep, his flat indifference to the sheep he sheared, and the phantom half-crown flickering in one eye of the anticipatory waiter; the pervading and confounding smell of stale beer over all the apartments; the prevalent, notion of bread, butter, tea, milk, sugar, as matter for the exercise of a native inventive genius—­these were reviewed in quips of metaphor.

‘Come, we can do better at an inn or two known to me,’ said Redworth.

’Surely this is the best that can be done for us, when we strike them with the magic wand of a postillion?’ said she.

‘It depends, as elsewhere, on the individuals entertaining us.’

’Yet you admit that your railways are rapidly “polishing off” the individual.’

‘They will spread the metropolitan idea of comfort.’

’I fear they will feed us on nothing but that big word.  It booms—­ a curfew bell—­for every poor little light that we would read by.’

Seeing their beacon-nosed postillion preparing too mount and failing in his jump, Redworth was apprehensive, and questioned the fellow concerning potation.

’Lord, sir, they call me half a horse, but I can’t ‘bids water,’ was the reply, with the assurance that he had not ‘taken a pailful.’

Habit enabled him to gain his seat.

’It seems to us unnecessary to heap on coal when the chimney is afire; but he may know the proper course,’ Diana said, convulsing Danvers; and there was discernibly to Redworth, under the influence of her phrases, a likeness of the flaming ‘half-horse,’ with the animals all smoking in the frost, to a railway engine.  ‘Your wrinkled centaur,’ she named the man.  Of course he had to play second to her, and not unwillingly; but he reflected passingly on the instinctive push of her rich and sparkling voluble fancy to the initiative, which women do not