Page:Lesbia Newman - Dalton - 1889.djvu/97

 one of either sex on account of weak health or other infirmity; it was only the prejudices of those who wished to keep her sex in the old grooves, which she snarled against and set her heel upon.

Playing one afternoon in the following summer at Ruddymere at lawn-tennis, a game in which her dress, of course, gave her a great advantage over other girls who had had much more practice, she happened to have as an opponent a Mr Julius Dandidimmons, a young loafer without any brains to speak of, who looked upon women generally as his inferiors by nature. On Lesbia’s making some clever stroke, he remarked,—

‘Well done, Miss Newman; you really play very well, for a lady.’

This riled Lesbia, but she said nothing, watched her opportunity, and when they happened to be both near the net, she returned the ball with her favourite stroke and caught him such a stinger in the face that he had to retire from the game, followed by Lesbia’s apology.

‘Dear me, Mr Dandidimmons, what a pity! Too smart for a lady, wasn’t it? I’m afraid you napped that heavily on your whisker-bed, as St Thomas Aquinas hath it.’

‘St Thomas Aquinas!’ exclaimed Rose Dimpleton, who was in the four.

‘Not St Thomas Aquinas?’ asked Lesbia innocently; ‘well then, the Sporting Slap-up, which was his organ, or some other equal authority.’

Several of the other ladies gathered round the wounded Julius; Lesbia presently came too, but only to punish him more under the guise of sympathy.

‘IT hate that Miss Newman,’ he afterwards confided to some intimate friends; ‘she’s not a bit like a gurl,—quite unsexed, a regular hoyden, don’t you know. I like gurls to