Shall You Sit
In His Presence, Or Stand And Grovel Alternately?
Does one have to
curtsy?
Very well, then, make any excuses you like for me, Hilda:
say I'm eccentric, say I'm deranged, say I'm a Nihilist. I will
hide under the scullery table, fling myself in the moat, lock myself
in the keep, let the portcullis fall on me, die any appropriate
early English death, - anything rather than curtsy in a tailor-made
gown; I can kneel beautifully, Hilda, if that will do: you
remember my ancestors were brought up on kneeling, and yours on
curtsying, and it makes a great difference in the muscles."
Hilda smiled benignantly as she wound the coil of russet hair round
her shapely head. "He will think whatever you do charming, and
whatever you say brilliant," she said; "that is the advantage in
being an American woman."
Just at this moment Lady Veratrum sent a haughty maid to ask us if
we would meet her under the trees in the park which surrounds the
house. I hailed this as a welcome reprieve to the dreaded function
of tea with the duke, and made up my mind, while descending the
marble staircase, that I would slip away and lose myself
accidentally in the grounds, appearing only in time for the London
train. This happy mode of issue from my difficulties lent a
springiness to my step, as we followed a waxwork footman over the
velvet sward to a nook under a group of copper beeches. But there,
to my dismay, stood a charmingly appointed tea-table glittering with
silver and Royal Worcester, with several liveried servants bringing
cakes and muffins and berries to Lady Veratrum, who sat behind the
steaming urn. I started to retreat, when there appeared, walking
towards us, a simple man, with nothing in the least extraordinary
about him.
"That cannot be the Duke of Cimicifugas," thought I, "a man in a
corduroy jacket, without a sign of a suite; probably it is a
Banished Duke come from the Forest of Arden for a buttered muffin."
But it was the Duke of Cimicifugas, and no other. Hilda was
presented first, while I tried to fire my courage by thinking of the
Puritan Fathers, and Plymouth Rock, and the Boston Tea-Party, and
the battle of Bunker Hill. Then my turn came. I murmured some
words which might have been anything, and curtsied in a stiff-necked
self-respecting sort of way. Then we talked, - at least the duke and
Lady Veratrum talked. Hilda said a few blameless words, such as
befitted an untitled English virgin in the presence of the nobility;
while I maintained the probationary silence required by Pythagoras
of his first year's pupils. My idea was to observe this first duke
without uttering a word, to talk with the second (if I should ever
meet a second), to chat with the third, and to secure the fourth for
Francesca to take home to America with her.
Of course I know that dukes are very dear, but she could afford any
reasonable sum, if she found one whom she fancied; the principal
obstacle in the path is that tiresome American lawyer with whom she
considers herself in love.
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