and thinking they were teasing it. So I got up the next
morning at early dawn--I know it was dawn, because there were
lark-noises in the sky, and the grass looked as if it had
been left out all night--and hunted up the most conspicuous
thing in the bird line that I could find, and measured the
distance, as nearly as it would let me, and shot away all I
knew. They said afterwards that it was a tame bird; that's
simply SILLY, because it was awfully wild at the first few
shots. Afterwards it quieted down a bit, and when its legs
had stopped waving farewells to the landscape I got a
gardener-boy to drag it into the hall, where everybody must
see it on their way to the breakfast-room. I breakfasted
upstairs myself. I gathered afterwards that the meal was
tinged with a very unchristian spirit. I suppose it's
unlucky to bring peacock's feathers into a house; anyway,
there was a blue-pencilly look in my hostess's eye when I
took my departure.

Some hostesses, of course, will forgive anything, even unto
pavonicide (is there such a word?), as long as one is nice-
looking and sufficiently unusual to counterbalance some of
the others; and there ARE others--the girl, for instance, who
reads Meredith, and appears at meals with unnatural
punctuality in a frock that's made at home and repented at
leisure. She eventually finds her way to India and gets
married, and comes home to admire the Royal Academy, and to
imagine that an indifferent prawn curry is for ever an
effective substitute for all that we have been taught to
believe is luncheon. It's then that she is really dangerous;
but at her worst she is never quite so bad as the woman who