Commonplace Book

'"Kate's friendship," strikes in Margaret, with what may be called a pleasant acid in her voice, "always reminds me of a little poem I used to learn in my youth -

"'Will you walk into my parlour? said the spider to the fly;
'Tis the prettiest little parlour that you ever did spy!'

I'm not so sure that they do always find it such a pretty little parlour, do they, Kate?"

It is sweet, saith Lucretius, to sit on a bank, and see a good ship battered to pieces by the waves under your very eyes; but it is not sweet to sit in a comfortable arm-chair and watch your younger sister putting her hook in the nose and her bridle in the jaws of any man you come in contact with.

"I deny the justness of the metaphor altogether," replies Kate, with a shadow of irritation in her clear young voice; "and anyhow, the parallel is very incomplete; for if any fly does not like my parlour, he is more than welcome to leave it with his full complement of legs and wings; you see what a character they give me" (sorrowfully to George). "'Give a dog a bad name,' you know; and such an innocent-minded dog, too!"

She looks innocence itself, as she turns her great eyes[,] wide open in a sort of aggrieved surprise, limpid as wells of water in a limestone country, upon him. Flirting is ingrained in the blood and bone and fibre of some women. One can no more blame them for it than for having a cast in the eye or a stammer. Kate would flirt with the undertaker who came to measure her for her coffin.'

from Not Wisely, But Too Well by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XIX)