Warwick Deeping

“ Stick to your sandals, my dear, and let your pretty white feet go brown in the sun. Better breathe in the open than freeze in a marble house. Just play the savage and let ambition go hang."
Igraine thanked him as though she held his counsel to be of the most inestimable value to herself. She was wise enough to know that to please an old man you must take his words in desperate earnest, and appear much caught by his supreme sagacity. Eudol smacked his lips and comfortably warm within himself. ”

“ They are content to straddle the crawling, leather-jointed circumspection that they call knowledge. The bird flutters to his mate, sings, soars, and is taken before night by the fowler. The snail creeps his rheumy round covered with the slime and slobber of prudence, to rot in the end under a tree-stump, unless some good throstle cracks him prematurely on a stone. ”

“ The lad blushed and went away thinking he had never seen such a pretty nun before, and wondering if there were many like her in the great abbey. Igraine watched him towards Winchester, and wished some country girl joy of a good husband.
Presently she held on again in great spirits, nor had she gone very far when a tinkling of bells came up behind her with a merry clatter of hoofs. Turning aside to give passage, she looked back and saw an old gentleman riding comfortably on a white mule with two servants jogging along behind him on cobs. ”

“ Igraine thought " Virgil " might well be Greek for " fool ", but she hid her ignorance under her hood. Eudol ran on to dilate on the subtleties of husbandry, making a fine parade of expert phraseology in the doing of it.
"I see you do not follow me," he said presently. "Young folk are not fond of turning over the sods; they love grass for a scamper, not clay and dull loam. Shall we talk of petticoats or sarcenet that runs down a pretty figure like water? Eh, my dear? You set the tune, I'll follow." Igraine contented herself with keeping him to his hobby. ”