Alvina looked at Arthur. Arthur was short and dark-haired and nicely
coloured. But, now his brother was there, he too seemed to have a
dumb, aqueous silence, fish-like and aloof, about him. He seemed to
swim like a fish in his own little element. Strange it all was,
like Alice in Wonderland. Alvina understood now Lottie's strained
sort of thinness, a haggard, sinewy, sea-weedy look. The poor thing
was all the time swimming for her life.
For Alvina it was a most curious tea-party. She listened and smiled
and made vague answers to Albert, who leaned his broad, thin,
brittle shoulders towards her. Lottie seemed rather shadowily to
preside. But it was Arthur who came out into communication. And now,
uttering his rather broad-mouthed speeches, she seemed to hear in
him a quieter, subtler edition of his father. His father had been a
little, terrifically loud-voiced, hard-skinned man, amazingly
uneducated and amazingly bullying, who had tyrannized for many years
over the Sunday School children during morning service. He had been
an odd-looking creature with round grey whiskers: to Alvina, always
a creature, never a man: an atrocious leprechaun from under the
Chapel floor. And how he used to dig the children in the back with
his horrible iron thumb, if the poor things happened to whisper or
nod in chapel!
These were his children--most curious chips of the old block. Who
ever would have believed she would have been taking tea with them.
"Why don't you have a bicycle, and go out on it?" Arthur was saying.
"But I can't ride," said Alvina.
"You'd learn in a couple of lessons. There's nothing in riding a
bicycle."
"I don't believe I ever should," laughed Alvina.
"You don't mean to say you're nervous?" said Arthur rudely and
sneeringly.
"I _am_," she persisted.
"You needn't be nervous with me," smiled Albert broadly, with his
odd, genuine gallantry. "I'll hold you on."
"But I haven't got a bicycle," said Alvina, feeling she was slowly
colouring to a deep, uneasy blush.
"You can have mine to learn on," said Lottie. "Albert will look
after it."
"There's your chance," said Arthur rudely. "Take it while you've got
it."
Now Alvina did not want to learn to ride a bicycle. The two Miss
Carlins, two more old maids, had made themselves ridiculous for
ever by becoming twin cycle fiends. And the horrible energetic
strain of peddling a bicycle over miles and miles of high-way did
not attract Alvina at all. She was completely indifferent to
sight-seeing and scouring about. She liked taking a walk, in her
lingering indifferent fashion. But rushing about in any way was
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