Part 1 (1/2)
Doctor Cupid.
by Rhoda Broughton.
CHAPTER I
WHAT THE BIG HOUSE OWES TO US.
1. As much of our company as it likes to command.
2. As much dance music as it can get out of our fingers.
3. The complete transfer of all the bores among its guests from its shoulders to ours.
4. The entire management of its Workhouse teas.
5. The wear and tear of mind of all its Christmas-trees and bran-pies.
6. The physicking of its sick dogs.
7. The setting its canaries' broken legs.
8. The general cheerful and grateful charing for it.
WHAT WE OWE TO THE BIG HOUSE.
1. Heartburnings from envy.
2. Headaches from dissipation.
3. The chronic discontent of our three maids.
4. The utter demoralisation of our boot-boy.
5. The acquaintance of several damaged fine ladies.
6. A roll of red flannel from the last wedding.
7. The occasional use of a garden-hose.
'There! I do not think that the joys and sorrows of living in a little house under the shadow of a big one were ever more lucidly set forth,'
says an elder sister, holding up the slate on which she has just been totting up this ingenious debit and credit account to a pink junior, kneeling, head on hand, beside her; a junior who, not so long ago, did sums on that very slate, and the straggle of briony round whose sailor-hat tells that she has only just left the sunburnt harvest-fields and the overgrown August hedgerows behind her.
'We have had a good deal of fun out of it too,' says she, rather remorsefully. 'Do you remember'--with a sigh of recollected enjoyment--'the day that we all blackened our faces with soot, and could not get the soot off again afterwards?'
To what but a mind of seventeen could such a reminiscence have appeared in the light of a departed joy?
'I have left out an item, I see,' says Margaret, running her eye once again over her work; 'an unlimited quant.i.ty of the society of Freddy Ducane, when nothing better turns up for him! Under which head, profit or loss'--glancing with a not more than semi-amused smile at her sister--'am I to enter it, eh, Prue?'