"Have you ever ridden in a steeplechase?" Somerfield asked him.
"What Somerfield was thinking, my dear Prince," he said, "was that a steeplechase course, as they ride in this country, needs some knowing.
"For a man who has never even hunted and knows nothing whatever about the country," Somerfield declared, "to attempt to ride in a steeplechase of this sort is sheer folly.
Bransome, who was also in riding clothes, although he was not taking part in the steeplechases himself, glanced at the clock.
That year races and a
steeplechase had been arranged for the officers.
Soon after I left the stable there was a
steeplechase, and he determined to ride.
Hetty's was a spring-tide beauty; it was the beauty of young frisking things, round-limbed, gambolling, circumventing you by a false air of innocence--the innocence of a young star- browed calf, for example, that, being inclined for a promenade out of bounds, leads you a severe
steeplechase over hedge and ditch, and only comes to a stand in the middle of a bog.
It was a
steeplechase, with four hurdles, all pretty high.
"If he had but a little more brains," she thought to herself, "I might make something of him"; but she never let him perceive the opinion she had of him; listened with indefatigable complacency to his stories of the stable and the mess; laughed at all his jokes; felt the greatest interest in Jack Spatterdash, whose cab-horse had come down, and Bob Martingale, who had been taken up in a gambling- house, and Tom Cinqbars, who was going to ride the
steeplechase. When he came home she was alert and happy: when he went out she pressed him to go: when he stayed at home, she played and sang for him, made him good drinks, superintended his dinner, warmed his slippers, and steeped his soul in comfort.
"A long engagement exhausts them, but they are capital at a
steeplechase. They take things flying.
He was riding, in imagination, some desperate
steeplechase at that moment.
"Let us go there at once!" cried Benassis, and he made straight for the little wood, urging his horse at a furious speed across the ditches and fields, as if he were riding a
steeplechase, in his anxiety to catch the sportsman red-handed.