Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/146

Rh him more and more—the more certain she felt that the fourth, if that fourth should be Mr. John Rochester, would not like Mr. Dix so much as she did.

There was a breathless feeling of being on the edge of things.

They made conversation:

"I wish Shelley hadn't said that about the lamb that looks you in the face," said Lucilla. And that kept them going for a while.

Then: "This gooseberry-pie ought to have cream with it," said Jane; "but the cream here doesn't seem real somehow. Let's write to Gladys to post us some from Mutton's, shall we? Gladys was one of the maids at school."

Then they told Mr. Dix about Gladys.

They all laughed a great deal and ate up everything that there was to eat.

When the meal was over, Lucilla produced with an air of conscious pride a crumpled packet of cigarettes.

"You'd like to smoke?" she said, offering also matches.

The cigarette which Mr. Dix extracted from the packet was bent but not broken. He straightened it and lit it. Not for worlds would he have produced the new crisp cigarettes that he had bought that morning. Something about that timeworn little packet of Lucilla's convinced him that neither of the ladies smoked. Still, he put the question.

"But you?" he asked. "What am I thinking of?" and he proffered the broken-backed case.

"We don't," said Jane. "I believe everyone else does, so we tried. But we don't like it."

"Gladys smokes," said Lucilla. "It was Gladys who got us the cigarettes to try; we only tried one each. They didn't make us ill. . . . Gladys said they did some people—but they don't really taste nice, and we couldn't smell the flowers or the wet grass or pine-woods nearly so well afterwards. So we didn't go on with it."

"You don't dislike my smoking? Doesn't it poison the air for you?" he asked, laying down the cigarette.