to bed dead drunk on mead!  It is so absurd to boast of one’s ancestry!  If we could only just see the dreadful men who began all the great families, we should be perfectly ashamed of them!  Most of them tore up their food with their fingers.  Now we Vancourts are supposed to be descended from a warrior bold, named Robert Priaulx de Vaignecourt, who fought in the Crusades.  Poor Uncle Fred used to be so proud of that!  He was always talking about it, especially when we were in America.  He liked to try and make the Pilgrim-Father-families jealous.  Just as he used to boast that if he had only been born three minutes before my father, instead of three minutes after, he would have been the owner of Abbot’s Manor.  That three minutes’ delay and consideration he took about coming into the world made him the youngest twin, and cut off his chances.  And he told me that Robert the Crusader had a brother named Osmond, who was believed to have founded a monastery somewhere in this neighbourhood, and who died, so the story goes, during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, though there’s no authentic trace left of either Osmond or Robert anywhere.  They might, of course, have been very decent and agreeable men,—­but it’s rather doubtful.  If Osmond went on a pilgrimage he would never have washed himself, to begin with,—­it would have destroyed his sanctity.  And as for Robert the warrior bold, he would have been dreadfully fierce and hairy,—­and I’m quite sure I could not possibly have asked him to dinner!”

She laughed at her own fancies, and guided her mare under a drooping canopy of early-flowering wild acacia, just for the sheer pleasure of springing lightly up in her saddle to pull off a tuft of scented white blossom.

“The fact is,” she continued half aloud, “there’s nobody I can ask to dinner even now as it is.  Not down here.  The local descriptions of Sir Morton Pippitt do not tempt me to make his acquaintance, and as for the parson I met just now,-why he would be impossible!—­ simply impossible!” she repeated with emphasis—­” I can see exactly what he’s like at a glance.  One of those cold, quiet, clever men who ‘quiz’ women and never admire them,—­I know the kind of horrid University creature!  A sort of superior, touch-me-not-person who can barely tolerate a woman’s presence in the room, and in his heart of hearts relegates the female sex generally to the lowest class of the animal creation.  I can read it all in his face.  He’s rather good-looking—­not very,—­his hair curls quite nicely, but it’s getting grey, and so is his moustache,—­he must be at least fifty, I should think.  He has a good figure—­for a clergyman;—­and his eyes—­no, I’m not sure that I like his eyes—­I believe they’re deceitful.  I must look at them again before I make up my mind.  But I know he’s just as conceited and disagreeable as most parsons—­he probably thinks that he helps to turn this world and the next round on his little finger,—­and I daresay he tells the poor village folk here that if they don’t obey him, they’ll go to hell, and if they do, they’ll fly straight to heaven and put on golden crowns at once.  Dear me!  What a ridiculous state of things!  Fancy the dear old man in the smock who came to see me last night, with a pair of wings and a crown!”