Doctor Cupid: A Novel

What the Big House Owes to us. What we Owe to the Big House. 1. As much of our company as it likes to command. 1. Heartburnings from envy. 2. As much dance music as it can get out of our fingers. 2. Headaches from dissipation. 3. The complete transfer of all the bores among its guests from its shoulders to ours. 3. The chronic discontent of our three maids. 4. The entire management of its Workhouse teas. 4. The utter demoralisation of our boot-boy. 5. The wear and tear of mind of all its Christmas-trees and bran-pies. 5. The acquaintance of several damaged fine ladies. 6. The physicking of its sick dogs. 6. A roll of red flannel from the last wedding. 7. The setting its canaries' broken legs. 7. The occasional use of a garden-hose. 8. The general cheerful and grateful charing for it. 'There! I do not think that the joys and sorrows of living in a little house under the shadow of a big one were ever more lucidly set forth,' says an elder sister, holding up the slate on which she has just been totting up this ingenious debit and credit account to a pink junior, kneeling, head on hand, beside her; a junior who, not so long ago, did sums on that very slate, and the straggle of briony round whose sailor-hat tells that she has only just left the sunburnt harvest-fields and the overgrown August hedgerows behind her. 'We have had a good deal of fun out of it too,' says she, rather remorsefully. 'Do you remember'—with a sigh of recollected enjoyment—'the day that we all blackened our faces with soot, and could not get the soot off again afterwards?' To what but a mind of seventeen could such a reminiscence have appeared in the light of a departed joy? 'I have left out an item, I see,' says Margaret, running her eye once again over her work; 'an unlimited quantity of the society of Freddy Ducane, when nothing better turns up for him! Under which head, profit or loss'—glancing with a not more than semi-amused smile at her sister—'am I to enter it, eh, Prue?' 'Loss, loss!' replies Prue, with a suspiciously rosy precipitation. 'No question about it; no one makes us lose so much time as he! Loss, loss!' Margaret's eyes rest for an instant on her sister's face, and then…