"In what character shall you take me?" he asked of Miss Horsman, when
we were going out on the lawn, and it dawned on him that Harry was to
be a Hercules.
"Oh! as Adonis, of course," said Hippo.
"Or Eurystheus," whispered her sister.
Eustace did not understand, and looked pleased, saying something
about a truly classical get up; but Harold muttered to me, "Aren't
they making game of him?"
"They will take care not to vex him," I said.
But Harold could not overlook it, and took a dislike to the Horsmans
on the spot, which all Hippolyta's genuine admiration of him could
not overcome. She knew what the work of his eighteen months in
England had been, and revered him with such enthusiasm for what she
called his magnificent manhood and beneficence, as was ready on the
least encouragement to have become something a good deal warmer; but
whatever she did served to make her distasteful to him. First, she
hastily shuffled over Eustace's portrait, because, as she allowed us
to hear, "he would give her no peace till he was disposed of." And
then she not only tormented her passive victim a good deal in trying
to arrange him as Hercules, but she forgot the woman in the artist,
and tried to make him bare his neck and shoulder in a way that made
him blush while he uttered his emphatic "No, no!" and Baby Jack
supported him by telling her she "would only make a prize-fighter of
him.
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