But he added that he thought nothing short of the last trump would do it." "I agree with him," said Hester, having first said the sentence to herself, and having decided it was innocuous.
The climax of the music lesson had arrived.

"The Blue Bells of Scotland"-- the sole _Clavier Stueck_ which Mary's rigidly extended little starfishes of hands could wrench out of the school-room piano--was at its third bar.
"Well," said Mr.Gresley, refreshed by a cheering retrospect.

"Now for 'Modern Dissent.'" A strenuous hour ensued.
Hester was torn in different directions, at one moment tempted to allow the most flagrant passages to pass unchallenged rather than attempt the physical impossibility of interrupting the reader only to be drawn into a dispute with him, at another burning to save her brother from the consequences which wait on certain utterances.
Presently Mr.Gresley's eloquence, after various tortuous and unnatural windings, swept in the direction of a pun, as a carriage after following the artificial curves of a deceptive approach nears a villa.

Hester had seen the pun coming for half a page, as we see the villa through the trees long before we are allowed to approach it, and she longed to save her brother from what was in her eyes as much a degradation as a _tu quoque_.

But she remembered in time that the Gresleys considered she had no sense of humor, and she decided to let it pass.