"Allen, Grant - Miss Cayley's Adventures 01 - The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Lady" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Grant)

'I have never been to one,' Elsie put in.

'Gracious heavens, neither have I! What on earth do you
take me for? But I mean to see where fate will lead me.'

'I may go with you?' Elsie pleaded.

'Certainly not, my child,' I answered--she was three years
older than I, so I had the right to patronise her. 'That
would spoil all. Your dear little face would be quite
enough to scare away a timid adventure.' She knew what I
meant. It was gentle and pensive, but it lacked initiative.

So, when we had finished that wall, I popped on my best
hat, and popped out by myself into Kensington Gardens.

I am told I ought to have been terribly alarmed at the
straits in which I found myself--a girl of twenty-one, alone
in the world, and only twopence short of penniless, without
a friend to protect, a relation to counsel her. (I don't
count Aunt Susan, who lurked in ladylike indigence at
Blackheath, and whose counsel, like her tracts, was given
away too profusely to everybody to allow of one's placing
any very high value upon it.) But, as a matter of fact, I
must admit I was not in the least alarmed. Nature had
endowed me with a profusion of crisp black hair, and plenty
of high spirits. If my eyes had been like Elsie's--that
liquid blue which looks out upon life with mingled pity and
amazement--I might have felt as a girl ought to feel under
such conditions; but having large dark eyes, with a bit of a
twinkle in them, and being as well able to pilot a bicycle
as any girl of my acquaintance, I have inherited or acquired
an outlook on the world which distinctly leans rather
towards cheeriness than despondency. I croak with
difficulty. So I accepted my plight as an amusing
experience, affording full scope for the congenial exercise
of courage and ingenuity.

How boundless are the opportunities of Kensington Gardens
--the Round Pond, the winding Serpentine, the mysterious
seclusion of the Dutch brick Palace! Genii swarm there.
One jostles possibilities. It is a land of romance, bounded
on the north by the Abyss of Bayswater, and on the south by
the Amphitheatre of the Albert Hall.

But for a centre of adventure I choose the Long Walk; it
beckoned me somewhat as the North-West Passage beckoned my
seafaring ancestors--the buccaneering mariners of
Elizabethan Devon. I sat down on a chair at the foot of an
old elm with a poetic hollow, prosaically filled by a