Here she made a grimace, drawing her mouth down into the elongated frown of the famous Florentine, with such an irresistibly comic effect that Adderley gave way to a peal of hearty, almost boyish laughter.
"That's right!" said Cicely approvingly--"That's YOU, you know! It's natural to laugh at your age--you're only about six or seven-and- twenty, aren't you?"
"I shall be twenty-seven in August,"--he said with a swift return to solemnity--"That is, as you will admit, getting on towards thirty."
"Oh, nonsense! Everybody's getting on towards thirty, of course--or towards sixty, or towards a hundred. I shall be fifteen in October, but 'you will admit'"--here she mimicked his voice and accent--"that I am getting on towards a hundred. Some folks think I've turned that already, and that I'm entering my second century, I talk so 'old.' But my talk is nothing to what I feel--I feel--oh!" and she gave a kind of angular writhe to her whole figure--"like twenty Methusalehs in one girl!"
"You are an original!"--said Julian, nodding at her with an air of superior wisdom--"That's what you are!"
"Like you, Sir Moon-Calf"--said Cicely--"The word 'moon-calf,' you know, stands for poet--it means a human calf that grazes on the moon. Naturally the animal never gets fat,--nor will you; it always looks odd--and so will you; it never does anything useful,--nor will you; and it puts a kind of lunar crust over itself, under which crust it writes verses. When you break through, its crust you find something like a man, half-asleep--not knowing whether he's man or boy, and uncertain, whether to laugh or be serious till some girl pokes fun at him--and then---"
"And then?"--laughed Adderley, entering vivaciously into her humour- -"What next?"
"This, next!"--and Cicely pelted him full in the face with one of her velvety cowslip-bunches--'And this,--catch me if you can!"
Away she flew over the grass, with Adderley after her. Through tall buttercups and field daisies they raced each other like children,-- startling astonished bees from repasts in clover-cups--and shaking butterflies away from their amours on the starwort and celandines. The private gate leading into Abbot's Manor garden stood open,-- Cicely rushed in, and shut it against her pursuer who reached it almost at the same instant.
"Too bad!" he cried laughingly--"You mustn't keep me out! I'm bound to come inside!"