Wednesdays.
She frightened me horribly once at a private view by saying mysteriously,
'I oughtn't to be here, you know; this is one of my days.' I thought she
meant that she was subject to periodical outbreaks and was expecting an
attack at any moment. So embarrassing if she had suddenly taken it into
her head that she was Cesar Borgia or St. Elizabeth of Hungary. That
sort of thing would make one unpleasantly conspicuous even at a private
view. However, she merely meant to say that it was Wednesday, which at
the moment was incontrovertible. Well, she's on quite a different tack
to the Klopstock. She doesn't visit anywhere very extensively, and, of
course, she's awfully keen for me to drag in an incident that occurred at
one of the Beauwhistle garden-parties, when she says she accidentally hit
the shins of a Serene Somebody or other with a croquet mallet and that he
swore at her in German. As a matter of fact, he went on discoursing on
the Gordon-Bennett affair in French. (I never can remember if it's a new
submarine or a divorce. Of course, how stupid of me!) To be
disagreeably exact, I fancy she missed him by about two
inches--over-anxiousness, probably--but she likes to think she hit him.
I've felt that way with a partridge which I always imagine keeps on
flying strong, out of false pride, till it's the other side of the hedge.
She said she could tell me everything she was wearing on the occasion. I
said I didn't want my book to read like a laundry list, but she explained
that she didn't mean those sort of things."

"And there's the Chilworth boy, who can be charming as long as he's
content to be stupid and wear what he's told to; but he gets the idea now
and then that he'd like to be epigrammatic, and the result is like
watching a rook trying to build a nest in a gale. Since he got wind of
the book, he's been persecuting me to work in something of his about the
Russians and the Yalu Peril, and is quite sulky because I won't do it."

"Altogether, I think it would be rather a brilliant inspiration if you
were to suggest a fortnight in Paris."

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