“What a noble river!” remarked Lord Dunbeg, as the boat passed out upon the wide stream; “I suppose you often sail on it?”
“I never was here in my life till now,” replied the untruthful Miss Dare; “we don’t think much of it; it’s too small; we’re used to so much larger rivers.”
“I am afraid you would not like our English rivers then; they are mere brooks compared with this.”
“Are they indeed?” said Victoria, with an appearance of vague surprise; “how curious! I don’t think I care to be an Englishwoman then. I could not live without big rivers.”
Lord Dunbeg stared, and hinted that this was almost unreasonable.
“Unless I were a Countess!” continued Victoria, meditatively, looking at Alexandria, and paying no attention to his lordship; “I think I could manage if I were a C‑c‑countess. It is such a pretty title!”
“Duchess is commonly thought a prettier one,” stammered Dunbeg, much embarrassed. The young man was not used to chaff from women.
“I should be satisfied with Countess. It sounds well. I am surprised that you don’t like it.” Dunbeg looked about him uneasily for some means of escape but he was barred in. “I should think you would feel an awful responsibility in selecting a Countess. How do you do it?”
Lord Dunbeg nervously joined in the general laughter as Sybil ejaculated: “Oh, Victoria!” but Miss Dare continued without a smile or any elevation of her monotonous voice:
“Now, Sybil, don’t interrupt me, please. I am deeply interested in Lord Dunbeg’s conversation. He understands that my interest is purely scientific, but my happiness requires that I should know how Countesses are selected. Lord Dunbeg, how would you recommend a friend to choose a Countess?”
Lord Dunbeg began to be amused by her impudence, and he even tried to lay down for her satisfaction one or two rules for selecting Countesses, but long before he had invented his first rule, Victoria had darted off to a new subject.
“Which would you rather be, Lord Dunbeg? an Earl or George Washington?”
“George Washington, certainly,” was the Earl’s courteous though rather bewildered reply.
“Really?” she asked with a languid affectation of surprise; “it is awfully kind of you to say so, but of course you can’t mean it.”
“Indeed I do mean it.”
“Is it possible? I never should have thought it.”
“Why not, Miss Dare?”
“You have not the air of wishing to be George Washington.”
“May I again ask, why not?”
“Certainly. Did you ever see George Washington?”
“Of course not. He died fifty years before I was born.”
“I thought so. You see you don’t know him. Now, will you give us an idea of what you imagine General Washington to have looked like?”
Dunbeg gave accordingly a flattering description of General Washington, compounded of Stuart’s portrait and Greenough’s statue of Olympian Jove with Washington’s features, in the Capitol Square. Miss Dare listened with an expression of superiority not unmixed with patience, and then she enlightened him as follows:
“All you have been saying is perfect stuff—excuse the vulgarity of the expression. When I am a Countess I will correct my language. The truth is that General Washington was a rawboned country farmer, very hard-featured, very awkward, very illiterate and very dull; very bad tempered, very profane, and generally tipsy after dinner.”
“You shock me, Miss Dare!” exclaimed Dunbeg.
“Oh! I know all about General Washington. My grandfather knew him intimately, and often stayed at Mount Vernon for weeks together. You must not believe what you read, and not a word of what Mr. Carrington will say. He is a Virginian and will tell you no end of fine stories and not a syllable of truth in one of them. We are all patriotic about Washington and like to hide his faults. If I weren’t quite sure you would never repeat it, I would not tell you this. The truth is that even when George Washington was a small boy, his temper was so violent that no one could do anything with him. He once cut down all his father’s fruit-trees in a fit of passion, and then, just because they wanted to flog him, he threatened to brain his father with the hatchet. His aged wife suffered agonies from him. My grandfather often told me how he had seen the General pinch and swear at her till the poor creature left the room in tears; and how once at Mount Vernon he saw Washington, when quite an old man, suddenly rush at an unoffending visitor, and chase him off the place, beating him all the time over the head with a great stick with knots in it, and all just because he heard the poor man stammer; he never could abide s‑s‑stammering.”
Carrington and Gore burst into shouts of laughter over this description of the Father of his country, but Victoria continued in her gentle drawl to enlighten Lord Dunbeg in regard to other subjects with information equally mendacious, until he decided that she was quite the most eccentric person he had ever met. The boat arrived at Mount Vernon while she was still engaged in a description of the society and manners of America, and especially of the rules which made an offer of marriage necessary. According to her, Lord Dunbeg was in imminent peril; gentlemen, and especially foreigners, were expected, in all the States south of the Potomac, to offer themselves to at least one young lady in every city: “and I had only yesterday,” said Victoria, “a letter from a lovely girl in North Carolina, a dear friend of mine, who wrote me that she was right put out because her brothers had called on a young English visitor with shotguns, and she was afraid he wouldn’t recover, and, after all, she says she should have refused him.”
Meanwhile Madeleine, on the other side of the boat, undisturbed by the laughter that surrounded Miss Dare, chatted soberly and seriously with
