not you think that perhaps if you could be a
little more companionable to Kate, and not say things so evidently for
the sake of contradiction, you might gain a little useful influence?'

'Well,' said Elizabeth, smiling, 'I believe I do deserve a good
scolding; I fancy I was outrageously rude; but when people talk such
stuff, I do not much care what I say, as long as I am on the other side
of the question.'

'Still the reverse of wrong is not always right,' said Anne.

They now found themselves at the nursery door, and summoned the
children from that scene of playthings, and bread and butter.
Down-stairs, one of those games at romps arose, for which little
children are often made an excuse by great ones, and which was only
concluded by the entrance of the ladies from the drawing-room, which
caused Harriet hastily to retreat into the inner drawing-room, to
smoothe her ruffled lace; while Katherine was re-tying Winifred's
loosened sash, and laying a few refractory curls in their right places.

Mrs. Woodbourne called Elizabeth, and introduced her as 'my eldest
daughter,' to Mrs. Bouverie, and to Mrs. Dale, a lady who had lately
come to live in the neighbourhood, and who discovered a most striking
resemblance between Mrs. Woodbourne and Elizabeth, certainly at the
expense of a considerable stretch of imagination, as Mrs. Woodbourne
was a very little and very elegant looking person, very fair and pale,
and Elizabeth was tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired, her figure much too
slender for her height, and her movements too rapid to be graceful,
altogether as different a style of person as could well be imagined.

Not much prepossessed in favour of the party in general by this
specimen, Elizabeth, after shaking hands with Miss Maynard and her
niece, people whom she seldom saw, and did not much like, retreated to
one of the windows, and there began to meditate, as was her usual
custom on such occasions. Once, when accompanying Mrs. Woodbourne on a
morning visiting expedition, she had translated the Erl King, which she
knew by heart, into English, far more literal than Sir Walter Scott's,
and with no fault, except that not above half the couplets professed to
rhyme, and most of those that did were deficient in metre. Another
time she had composed three quarters of a story of a Saxon hero,
oppressed by a Norman baron, and going to the Crusades; and at another
time she had sent back the whole party to the times of Queen Elizabeth,