e quintain too, it'll
answer capital, no doubt."

Miss Thorne made no reply. She felt that she had no good ground on
which to defend her sex of the present generation from the sarcasm
of Mr. Plomacy. She had once declared, in one of her warmer moments,
"that now-a-days the gentlemen were all women, and the ladies all
men." She could not alter the debased character of the age. But,
such being the case, why should she take on herself to cater for the
amusement of people of such degraded tastes? This question she asked
herself more than once, and she could only answer herself with a
sigh. There was her own brother Wilfred, on whose shoulders rested
all the ancient honours of Ullathorne house; it was very doubtful
whether even he would consent to "go at the quintain," as Mr. Plomacy
not injudiciously expressed it.

And now the morning arrived. The Ullathorne household was early on
the move. Cooks were cooking in the kitchen long before daylight,
and men were dragging out tables and hammering red baize on to
benches at the earliest dawn. With what dread eagerness did Miss
Thorne look out at the weather as soon as the parting veil of night
permitted her to look at all! In this respect, at any rate, there
was nothing to grieve her. The glass had been rising for the last
three days, and the morning broke with that dull, chill, steady,
grey haze which in autumn generally presages a clear and dry day.
By seven she was dressed and down. Miss Thorne knew nothing of the
modern luxury of _deshabilles_. She would as soon have thought of
appearing before her brother without her stockings as without her
stays--and Miss Thorne's stays were no trifle.

And yet there was nothing for her to do when down. She fidgeted out
to the lawn and then back into the kitchen. She put on her high-heeled
clogs and fidgeted out into the paddock. Then she went into the small
home park where the quintain was erected. The pole and cross-bar and
the swivel and the target and the bag of flour were all complete. She
got up on a carpenter's bench and touched the target with her hand;
it went round with beautiful ease; the swivel had been oiled to
perfection. She almost wished to take old Plomacy at his word, to get
on a side-saddle and have a tilt at it herself. What must a young man
be, thought she, who could prefer maundering among laurel trees with a
wishy-washy school-girl to such fun as this? "Well," said she aloud to
herself, "one man can take a horse