The Black Patch

"The man, Beatrice, the man. Give me a real man and I ask for nothing better. But the genuine male is so difficult to find nowadays."

"Really! Then you have been more successful than the majority."

"How sarcastic, how unfriendly! I did look for sympathy."

Beatrice embraced her companion affectionately. "You have it, Dinah. I give all sympathy and all good wishes to yourself and Jerry. May you be very happy as Mr. and Mrs. Snow!"

"Oh, we shall, we shall! Jerry would make an undertaker happy!"

"Undertakers generally are--when business is good."

"Oh! you are quite too up-to-date in your talk, Beatrice Hedge."

"That is strange, seeing how I live in a dull country garden like a snail, or a cabbage."

"Like a wild rose, dear. At least Vivian would say so."

"Mr. Paslow says more than he means," responded Beatrice, blushing redder than the flower mentioned, "and I dare say Jerry does also."

"No, dear. Jerry hasn't sufficient imagination."

"He ought to have, being a journalist."

"Those are the very people who never imagine anything. They find their facts on every hedge."

"Is that an unworthy pun on my name?"

"Certainly not, Miss Hedge," said the other with dignity; "Jerry shan't find anything on you, or in you, save a friend, else I shall be horribly jealous. As to Vivian, he would murder his future brother-in-law if he caught him admiring you; and I don't want to begin my married life with a corpse."

"Naturally. You wisely prefer the marriage service to the burial ditto, my clever Dinah."

"I'm not clever, and I really don't know how to answer your sharp speeches, seeing that I am a plain country girl."

"Not plain--oh! not plain. Jerry doesn't think so, I'm sure."

"It's very sweet and flattering of Jerry, but he's mercifully colour-blind and short-sighted. I am plain, with a pug nose, drab hair, freckles, and teeny-weeny eyes. You are the reverse, Beatrice, being all that is lovely--quite a gem."

"Don't tell my father that I am any sort of jewel," remarked Beatrice dryly, "else he will want to sell me at an impossible price."

Dinah laughed, but did not reply. Her somewhat flighty brain could not concentrate itself sufficiently to grasp the subtle conversation of Miss Hedge, so she threw herself back on the mossy stone seat and stared between half-closed eyelids at the garden. This was necessary, for the July sunshine blazed down on a mass of colour such as is rarely seen in sober-hued England. The garden might have been that of Eden, as delineated by Martin or Doré, from the tropical exuberance of flower and leaf. But the buildings scattered about this pleasance were scarcely of the primitive type which Adam and his spouse would have inhabited: rather were they expressions of a late and luxurious civilisation.

And again, they could scarcely be called buildings in the accepted sense of the word, as they had been constructed to run on iron rails, at the tail of a locomotive. To be plain, seven railway carriages, with their wheels removed, did duty for dwellings, and very odd they looked amidst surroundings alien to their original purpose. A Brixton villa would scarcely have seemed more out of place in the Desert of Sahara.