Page:Oswald Bastable and Others - Nesbit.djvu/363

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THE WHITE HORSE
317

outside things, so they made me old outside; but the bread-and milk——'

'Was an inside thing, of course—quite inside.'

'Yes, so it made me old inside of my mind, just old enough to have the sense to see that you were all the fortune I wanted, and more than I deserved.'

'I didn't have to be so very old to know what fortune I wanted,' said Joyce, 'but, then, I was a girl. Boys are always much stupider than girls, aren't they?'

The only person in this story you are likely to have heard of is, of course, Invicta, and he is better known as the White Horse of Kent.

You can see pictures of him all over his county: on brewers circulars and all sorts of documents, and carved in stone on buildings, and even on the disagreeable, insulting fronts of traction-engines. Traction-engines pretend to despise horses, but they carry the image of the White Horse on their hearts. And his name is generally put underneath his picture, so that there shall be no mistake.