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Pyramids?
Come, Eddy?”
     
  “Why should she be such a little—tall, I
mean—goose, as to hate the Pyramids, Rosa?”
     
  “Ah! you should hear Miss Twinkleton,”
often nodding her head, and much enjoying the Lumps, “bore about them, and then
you wouldn't ask. Tiresome old burying-grounds! Isises, and Ibises, and
Cheopses, and Pharaohses; who cares about them? And then there was Belzoni, or
somebody, dragged out by the legs, half-choked with bats and dust. All the
girls say: Serve him right, and hope it hurt him, and wish he had been quite
choked.”
     
  The two youthful figures, side by side,
but not now arm-in-arm, wander discontentedly about the old Close; and each
sometimes stops and slowly imprints a deeper footstep in the fallen leaves.
     
  “Well!” says Edwin, after a lengthy
silence. “According to custom. We can't get on, Rosa.”
     
  Rosa tosses her head, and says she don't
want to get on.
     
  “That's a pretty sentiment, Rosa,
considering.”
     
  “Considering what?”
     
  “If I say what, you'll go wrong again.”
     
  “YOU'LL go wrong, you mean, Eddy. Don't
be ungenerous.”
     
  “Ungenerous! I like that!”
     
  “Then I DON'T like that, and so I tell
you plainly,” Rosa pouts.
     
  “Now, Rosa, I put it to you. Who
disparaged my profession, my destination—”
     
  “You are not going to be buried in the
Pyramids, I hope?” she interrupts, arching her delicate eyebrows. “You never
said you were. If you are, why haven't you mentioned it to me? I can't find out
your plans by instinct.”
     
  “Now, Rosa, you know very well what I
mean, my dear.”
     
  “Well then, why did you begin with your
detestable red-nosed giantesses? And she would, she would, she would, she
would, she WOULD powder it!” cries Rosa, in a little burst of comical
contradictory spleen.
     
  “Somehow or other, I never can come
right in these discussions,” says Edwin, sighing and becoming resigned.
     
  “How is it possible, sir, that you ever
can come right when you're always wrong? And as to Belzoni, I suppose he's
dead;—I'm sure I hope he is—and how can his legs or his chokes concern you?”
     
  “It is nearly time for your return,
Rosa. We have not had a very happy walk, have we?”
     
  “A happy walk? A detestably unhappy
walk, sir. If I go up-stairs the moment I get in and cry till I can't take my
dancing lesson, you are responsible, mind!”
     
  “Let us be friends, Rosa.”
     
  “Ah!” cries Rosa, shaking her head and
bursting into real tears, “I wish we COULD be friends! It's because we can't be
friends, that we try one another so. I am a young little thing, Eddy, to have
an old heartache; but I really, really have, sometimes. Don't be angry. I know
you have one yourself too often. We should both of us have done better, if What
is to be had been left What might have been. I am quite a little serious thing
now, and not teasing you. Let each of us forbear, this one time, on our own
account, and on the other's!”
     
  Disarmed by this glimpse of a woman's
nature in the spoilt child, though for an instant disposed to resent it as seeming
to involve the enforced infliction of himself upon her, Edwin Drood stands
watching her as she childishly cries and sobs, with both hands to the
handkerchief at her eyes, and then—she becoming more composed, and indeed beginning
in her young inconstancy to laugh at herself for having been so moved—leads her
to a seat hard by, under the elm-trees.
     
  “One clear word of understanding, Pussy
dear. I am not clever out of my own line—now I come to think of it, I don't
know that I am particularly clever in it—but I want to do right. There is
not—there may be—I really don't see my way to what I want to say, but I must
say it before we part—there is not any other young—”
     
  “O no, Eddy! It's generous of you to ask
me; but no, no, no!”
     
  They have come