" If only Ena had known enough about earls and
their families to be sure whether Lord Raygan and Eileen would, in
their secret hearts, think the ways of the Rollses endlessly quaint or
melting, she might have been spared sleepless nights. Because the
difference between those two adjectives would mean the difference
between ecstasy and despair for her. Rags might be poor for an earl,
even an Irish earl, but he was hardly the sort to propose to a girl
his sister could speak of as "endlessly quaint."
Twelve days after they had arrived at Sea Gull Manor, Eileen wrote a
somewhat ungrammatical letter to a rich cousin in Dublin who had once
refused Rags, and in which she said:
DEAR POBBLES:
I wish you were here to pinch me. Then I would be sure whether I'm
asleep or awake. You'll know by the papers (s'pose poor old Rags _is_
worth a paragraph; anyhow Mubs is, now she's turned into a suff) how
we got carried on in the _Monarchic_ to New York. It won't be the
fault of American reporters if you've missed our news! They got at us
on the dock. Mubs loved it. Rags didn't.
Well, if you know a thing about us, since we were swept past
Queenstown by a giant wave that carried us on its back all the way to
America, you know we're staying with a family named Rolls.
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