Page:Wiggin--Ladies-in-waiting.djvu/243

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TWO ON A TOUR



contemn the groveling condition of a clerk to which my fortunes condemn me, and I would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station. … My youth excludes me from any hope of immediate preferment, but I mean to prepare the way for futurity.’ You see the yeast was stirring, even in the tropics, Dolly!”

“Well, I feel no yeast stirring in me,” she said languidly. “All the morning I have been trying to recapture a certain ‘Ode to a Cow’ written by a man of action in a country hotel where mother and I were sojourning last summer. I could have echoed it when I first regarded the inhabitants of these islands, and now anybody might say it of me, for I grow more and more cow-like with every passing day. It runs this way:

“‘ODE TO A CUD-CHEWING COW

“‘Why, Cow, art thou so satisfied,
So well content with all things here below,
So meek, so lazy, and so awful slow?
Dost thou not know that men’s affairs are mixed?

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