"I haven't seen you since breakfast, Nellie," she said gently. "Haven't you a kiss for me?"
Eleanor presented a perfunctory cheek over the banisters, taking care that it was not the one that had been kissed a few minutes before.
"Remember your promise," Aunt Enid whispered; "don't forget that your grandmother is an old lady and you must not excite her."
"But she excites me," said Eleanor doggedly. "She makes me want to smash windows and scream."
"Why, Nellie!" Miss Enid's mournful eyes filled with tears. Instantly Eleanor was all contrition.
"I'm sorry!" she said, with a real kiss this time. "I'll behave. Give you my word I will!" And, with an affectionate squeeze of the hand that clasped hers, she ran up the steps.
The upper hall, like the rest of the house, was pervaded by an air of gloomy grandeur. Everything was dreary, formal, fixed. Not an ornament or a picture had been changed since Eleanor could remember. She was the only young thing about the place, and it always seemed to her as if the house and its occupants were conspiring to make her old and staid and stupid, like themselves.
At the door of her grandmother's room she paused. As far back as she could remember, her quarrels with her grandmother had been the most terrifying events of her life. Repetition never robbed them of their horror, and no amount of spoiling between times could make up to her for the violence of the moment. It took all the courage she had to turn the knob of the door and enter.
A brigadier-general planning an important campaign would have presented no more commanding presence than did the formidable old lady who sat at a flat-top desk, issuing orders in a loud, decisive tone to a small meek-looking man who stood before her. The most arresting feature about Madam Bartlett was a towering white pompadour that began where most pompadours end, and soared to a surprising height above her large, handsome, masculine face. The fact that her hair line had gradually receded from her forehead to the top of her head affected no change whatever in the arrangement of her coiffure. Neither in regard to her hair nor to her figure had she yielded one iota to the whims of Nature. Her body was still confined in the stiffest of stays, and in spite of her seventy years was as straight as an arrow. At Eleanor's entrance she motioned her peremptorily to a chair and proceeded with the business in hand.
"You go back and tell Mr. Bangs," she was saying to the meek-looking person, "that I want him to send somebody up here who knows more than you do. Do you understand?"