Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/8

Rh "No," said Emmeline. "And stop talking about gratitude. And I won't have your old owls thrown in my face for the rest of my life. Let's have the lark."

If Jane, Lucilla, and Emmeline had not been debarred by their fifteen, fourteen, and sixteen years from the enjoyment of Lady Hendon's hospitality they would have had the pleasure of meeting—or at least, for it was a very big garden-party, they might have had the pleasure of meeting—the young man whom it is now my privilege to introduce to you.

John Rochester was young and, I am sorry to say, handsome. Sorry, because handsome men are, as a rule, so very stupid and so very vain. Still, there must be some exceptions to every rule. John Rochester was one of these exceptions: he was neither vain nor stupid. In fact he was more than rather clever, especially at his own game, which was engineering. Brains and beauty were not his only advantages. He had brains, beauty, and brawn—an almost irresistible combination. That is the bright side of the shield. The black side is this: he was not so tall, by three inches, as he could have wished to be, he had very big ambitions, very little money, very much less parsimony, and a temper.

He also had a mother who powdered too much, rouged rather too brightly, and appeared to govern almost her whole life by the consideration of "what people would say." She was quite a good mother in other respects, and John Rochester was quite fond of her. It was she who dragged him to this garden-party—that is to say, it was she who suggested it as an agreeable way of occupying the last day of the short holiday which he was spending with her. The young man himself would have preferred to loaf about in flannels and make himself useful by attacking the green-fly on the roses in his mother's garden with clouds of that smoke so hopefully supposed to be fatal to aphides. But Mrs. Rochester thought otherwise.