"And what a home-y family!" said Doctor John Hautayne.
"We have an old home-y house," said Miss Pennington, suddenly, "with landscape-papered walls and cosey, deep windows and big chimneys. And we don't half use it. Doctor Hautayne, I mean to have a party! Will you stay and come to it?"
"Any time within my two months' leave," replied Doctor Hautayne, "and with very great pleasure."
"So she will have it before very long," said Leslie, telling us about the talk the next day.
It! Well, when Miss Pennington took up a thing she did take it up! That does not come in here, though,—any more of it.
The Penningtons are very proud people. They have not a very great deal of money, like the Haddens, and they are not foremost in everything like the Marchbankses; somehow they do not seem to care to take the trouble for that; but they are so established; it is a family like an old tree, that is past its green branching time, and makes little spread or summer show, but whose roots reach out away underneath, and grasp more ground than all the rest put together.
They live in an old house that is just like them. It has not a new-fashioned thing about it. The walls are square, plain brick, painted gray; and there is a low, broad porch in front, and then terraces, flagged with gray stone and bordered with flower-beds at each side and below. They have peacocks and guinea-hens, and more roses and lilies and larkspurs and foxgloves and narcissus than flowers of any newer sort; and there are great bushes of box and southernwood, that smell sweet as you go by.
Old General Pennington had been in the army all his life. He was a captain at Lundy's Lane, and got a wound there which gave him a stiff elbow ever after; and his oldest son was killed in Mexico, just after he had been brevetted Major. There is a Major Pennington now,—the younger brother,—out at Fort Vancouver; and he is Pen's father. When her mother died, away out there, he had to send her home. The Penningtons are just as proud as the stars and stripes themselves; and their glory is off the selfsame piece.
They made very much of Dakie Thayne when he was here, in their quiet, retired way; and they had always been polite and cordial to the Inglesides.
One morning, a little while after our party, mother was making an apple-pudding for dinner, when Madam Pennington and Miss Elizabeth drove round to the door.