She stood with her arms folded, grimly surveying her mistress, who, if the truth must be told, was lying on a sofa in her bedroom, smoking a cigarette. Sarah knew her mistress' tastes, and had grown generally tolerant of them, but she still looked on the cigarettes with disapproval. Miss Brooke was discreet enough to smoke only in her own room or in her brother's study—a fact which had mollified Sarah a little when her mistress first began the practice.
"The minute you smoke one o' them nasty things in the street, ma'am, I shall give notice," she had said.
And Miss Brooke had quietly answered: "Very well, Sarah, we'll wait till then."
It must be added, for the benefit of all who are shocked by Miss Brooke's practice, that she had begun it by order of a doctor as a cure for neuralgia. She continued it because she liked it. Lesley was only just beginning to suspect her aunt of the habit, and was inexpressibly startled and alarmed at the thought of such a thing. That her aunt, who was indisputably kind, clever, benevolent, respectable in every way, should smoke cigarettes, seemed to Lesley to justify all that she had heard against her father's Bohemian household. She could not get over it. Sarah had got over this outrage on conventionality, but she was not yet prepared to forgive Lesley for having lived in a French convent.
"Oh, you're not sure about the house," said Miss Brooke. "Well, I'm sorry for you, Sarah. I'll send in a plumber if you think that would be any good."
"No, ma'am, don't; but if it will not ill-convenience you I should like to put a few tracts in Miss Lesley's room, so that she may look at them sometimes instead of the little book of Popish prayers that she has brought with her."
Miss Brooke wondered for a moment what the book of Popish prayers could be; and then remembered a little Russia-bound book—the well-known "Imitation of Christ" which she had noticed in Lesley's room, and which Sarah had doubtless mistaken for a book of prayer. It would not have been at all like Miss Brooke to clear up the mistake. She generally let mistakes clear themselves. She only gave one of her short, clear, rather hard laughs, and told Sarah to put as many tracts as she pleased in Lesley's room. Whereon, Lesley shortly afterwards found a bundle of these publications in her room, and, as she rather disliked their tone and tendency, she requested Sarah to take them away.
"They were put there for you to read," said Sarah, with stolid displeasure.
"By my aunt?"
"Your aunt knew that I was going to put them there. And it would be better for you to sit and read them rather than them rubbishy books you gets out of master's libery. Your poor, perishing soul ought to be looked after as well as your body."