"And growing," suggested Hilary.

"I say that greedy girl eats as much as any two of us. And as for her
clothes--her mother does not keep her even decent."

"She would find it difficult upon three pounds a year."

"Hilary, how dare you contradict me! I am only stating a plain fact."

"And I another. But, indeed, I don't want to talk Selina."

"You never do except when you are wished to be silent; and then your
tongue goes like any race horse."

"Does it? Well, like Gilpin's,

'It carries weight: it rides a race,
'Tis for a thousand pound?'

--and I only wish it were. Heigh ho! if I could but earn a thousand
pounds!"

Selina was too vexed to reply and for five quiet minutes Hilary bent
over her Homer which Mr. Lyon had taken such pleasure in teaching
her, because he said, she learned it faster than any of his grammar
school boys. She had forgotten all domestic grievances in a vision of
Thetis and the water nymphs; and was repeating to herself, first in
the sonorous Greek and then in Pope's small but sweet English, that
catalogue of oceanic beauties ending with