seeming _da capo_ of her mother is more skirts than anything else.
We credit their respective _apices_ with different dispositions,
although (yes, it's quite true what you say) we don't see exactly from
what corner of the Professor's his daughter got her better one. He's
all very well, but....

Anyhow, we are sorry for Tishy now, as she comes uneasily into the
library to be "spoken to." She comes in buttoning a glove and saying,
"Yes, papa." She was evidently just going out--probably arrested by
the voices in the library.

"Well, my dear, your mother wishes me to speak to you.... H'm! h'm!
By-the-bye," he interrupts himself, "it really is a very extraordinary
thing, but it's just like work-people. A man spends all his life laying
carpets, and the minute he lays mine it's too big or too small."

"The man outside? He's very tiresome. He says the passage is an unusual
size."

"I should have taken that point when I measured it. It seems to me late
in the day now the carpet's made up. However, that's neither here nor
there. Your mother wishes me to--a--to speak to you, my dear."

"What does she want you to say, papa?"

"H'm--well!--it's sometimes not easy to understand your mother. I
cannot say that I have gathered precisely what it is she wishes me
to say. Nor am I certain that I should be prepared to say it if I
knew what it was."--Tishy brightened perceptibly.--"But I am this
far in sympathy with what I suppose to be her meaning"--Tishy's face
fell--"that I should be very sorry to hear that you had made any
binding promises to any young gentleman without knowing more of his
antecedents and connexions than I suppose you do at the present about
this--a--musical friend of yours--without consulting me." The
perfunctory tone in which he added, "and your mother," made the words
hardly worth recording.

But perhaps the way they, in a sense, put the good lady out of court,
helped to make her daughter brighten up again. "Dear papa," she said,
"I should never dream for one moment of doing such a thing. Nor would
Mr. Bradshaw dream of asking me to do so."

"That's quite right, my dear--quite enough. Don't say anything more.
I am not going to catechize you." And Tishy was not sorry to hear
this, because her disclaimer of a binding promise was only true in the
letter. In fact, our direct Sally had only the day before pounced upon
her friend with, "You know perfectly well he's kissed you heaps of
times!" And Tishy had only b