“You won’t be faithless?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle.
Irene bent over and, for all answer, kissed her on the forehead. Mrs. Aldwinkle opened her glittering blue eyes and looked up at her, smiling, as she did so, that Siren smile that, for Irene, was still as fascinating as it had ever been.
“If only everybody were like my little Irene!” Mrs. Aldwinkle let her head fall forward and once more closed her eyes. There was a silence. “What are you sighing about in that heart-breaking way?” she suddenly asked.
Irene’s blush ran tingling up into her temples and disappeared under the copper-coloured fringe. “Oh, nothing,” she said, with an off-handedness that expressed the depth of her guilty embarrassment. That deep intake of breath, that brief and passionate expiry were not the components of a sigh. She had been yawning with her mouth shut.
But Mrs. Aldwinkle, with her bias towards the romantic, did not suspect the truth. “Nothing, indeed!” she echoed incredulously. “Why, it was the noise of the wind blowing through the cracks of a broken heart. I never heard such a sigh.” She looked at the reflection of Irene’s face in the mirror. “And you’re blushing like a peony. What is it?”
“But it’s nothing, I tell you,” Irene declared, speaking almost in a tone of irritation. She was annoyed with herself for having yawned so ineptly and blushed so pointlessly, rather than with her aunt. She immersed herself more than ever deeply in her brushing, hoping and praying that Mrs. Aldwinkle would drop the subject.
But Mrs. Aldwinkle was implacable in her tactlessness. “I never heard anything that sounded so love-sick,” she said, smiling archly into the looking-glass. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s humorous sallies had a way of falling ponderously, like bludgeon strokes, on the objects of her raillery. One never knew, when she was being sprightly, whether to feel sorrier for the victim or for Mrs. Aldwinkle herself. For though the victim might get hard knocks, the spectacle of Mrs. Aldwinkle laboriously exerting herself to deliver them was sadly ludicrous; one wished, for her sake, for the sake of the whole human race, that she would desist. But she never did. Mrs. Aldwinkle always carried all her jokes to the foreseen end, and generally far further than was foreseeable by any one less ponderously minded than herself. “It was like a whale sighing!” she went on with a frightful playfulness. “It must be a grand passion of the largest size. Who is it? Who is it?” She raised her eyebrows, she smiled with what seemed to her, as she studied it in the glass, a most wickedly sly but charming smile—like a smile in a comedy by Congreve, it occurred to her.
“But, Aunt Lilian,” protested Irene, almost in despair, almost in tears, “it was nothing, I tell you.” At moments like this she could almost find it in her to hate Aunt Lilian. “As a matter of fact, I was only….” She was going to blurt it out courageously; she was just going to tell Aunt Lilian—at the risk of a teasing or an almost equally unwelcome solicitude: either were better than this—that she had been merely yawning. But Mrs. Aldwinkle, still relentlessly pursuing her fun, interrupted her.
“But I guess who it is,” she said, wagging a forefinger at the glass. “I guess. I’m not such a blind stupid old auntie as you think. You imagine I haven’t noticed. Silly child! Did she think I didn’t see that he was very assiduous and that she rather liked it? Did she think her stupid old auntie was blind?”
Irene blushed again; the tears came into her eyes. “But who are you talking about?” she said in a voice that she had to make a great effort to keep from breaking and trembling out of control.