congenial
exercise of courage and ingenuity.

How boundless are the opportunities of Kensington Gardens--the Round
Pond, the winding Serpentine, the mysterious seclusion of the Dutch
brick Palace! Genii swarm there. One jostles possibilities. It is a land
of romance, bounded on the north by the Abyss of Bayswater, and on the
south by the Amphitheatre of the Albert Hall. But for a centre of
adventure I choose the Long Walk; it beckoned me somewhat as the
North-West Passage beckoned my seafaring ancestors--the buccaneering
mariners of Elizabethan Devon. I sat down on a chair at the foot of an
old elm with a poetic hollow, prosaically filled by a utilitarian plate
of galvanised iron. Two ancient ladies were seated on the other side
already--very grand-looking dames, with the haughty and exclusive
ugliness of the English aristocracy in its later stages. For frank
hideousness, commend me to the noble dowager. They were talking
confidentially as I sat down; the trifling episode of my approach did
not suffice to stem the full stream of their conversation. The great
ignore the intrusion of their inferiors.

[Illustration: OUI, MADAME; MERCI BEAUCOUP, MADAME.]

'Yes, it's a terrible nuisance,' the eldest and ugliest of the two
observed--she was a high-born lady, with a distinctly cantankerous cast
of countenance. She had a Roman nose, and her skin was wrinkled like a
wilted apple; she wore coffee-coloured point-lace in her bonnet, with a
complexion to match. 'But what could I do, my dear? I simply _couldn't_
put up with such insolence. So I looked her straight back in the
face--oh, she quailed, I can tell you; and I said to her, in my iciest
voice--you know how icy I can be when occasion demands it'--the second
old lady nodded an ungrudging assent, as if perfectly prepared to admit
her friend's rare gift of iciness--'I said to her, "Celestine, you can
take your month's wages, and half an hour to get out of this house." And
she dropped me a deep reverence, and she answered: "_Oui, madame; merci
beaucoup, madame; je ne desire pas mieux, madame._" And out she
flounced. So there was the end of it.'

'Still, you go to Schlangenbad on Monday?'

'That's the point. On Monday. If it weren't for the journey, I should
have been glad enough to be rid of the minx. I'm glad as it is, indeed;
for a more insolent, upstanding, independent, answer-you-back-again
young woman, with a sneer of her own, _I_ never saw, Amelia--but I
_must_ get