ers not heard of them? they would come bound they were a
couple of geniuses, from their conversation.

The old world grinned, and said to the girls' faces that the lasses had
better not be too zealous for the lads; they were generally fit to
manage their own business, and something more into the bargain. Uncle
Barnet would not care to have his niece Clary fling herself away with
her tidy fortune on a walking gentleman, though he were a genius.

The result was that Dulcie "bridled" in a twitter of wounded faith and
anger. Clarissa was superb and scornful. She ordered a full-length
portrait, and fixed the hour for the sitting within the week. Dulcie set
off alone with Master Will Locke--Dulcie, who knew no more of Redwater
than he should have done, if his wits had not been woolgathering--to
find the meadow which was beginning to purple over with the meadow
saffron.

But for all the townspeople laughed at Mistress Clary's and Mistress
Dulcie's flights, they never dreamt of them as unbecoming or containing
a bit of harm. Fine girls like Clary and Dulcie, especially an
accomplished girl like Clary, who could read French and do japan,
besides working to a wish in cross-stitch and tent-sketch, were not
persons to be slighted. The inhabitants saw for themselves that the
painters had coats which were not out at elbows, and tongues, one of
which was always wagging, and the other generally at rest, but which
never said a word fairly out of joint. They needed no further
introduction; the gentlemen called for the young men, the ladies
curtsied to them in the bar of the "Rod and Fly," in the church-porch,
in the common shop, and began conversations with them while they were
chaffering at the same counter for the same red ribbons to tie up the
men and the women's hair alike; and they felt that their manners were
vastly polite and gracious, an opinion which was not far from the
truth.

The Vicar lent the painters books. The Mayor invited them to supper. The
nearest Justice, who was a family man, with a notable wife, had them to
a domestic party, where they heard a little girl repeat a fable, and saw
the little coach which the Justice had presented to his son and heir,
then in long clothes, in which he was to be drawn along the smooth oak
boarded passages of the paternal mansion as soon as he could sit
upright.

Lastly, Clarissa Gage, under the sufficient guardianship of Cambridge,
treated the strangers to a real piece of sport--a