There was something so insistent about that question that Beth wrote at once, reassuring her strange friend, that she was to return to Rivercliff. Cynthia’s address was on Dekalb Avenue, Philadelphia. Beth wondered what part of the city that was—whether it was in the wealthy residential portion, where presumably Cynthia had secured her “good job,” or among the poor of the Quaker metropolis. Beth did not believe that it could be at the orphanage in which Cynthia presumably had been brought up.
Beth had looked forward to her visit to Molly and the seven aunts with a great deal of satisfaction and curiosity; nor was she disappointed. It proved interesting and she made seven very lovely friends. The aunts and Molly lived together in a big house in the better residential section of Hambro, and were, indeed, quite the most important people, socially, in the whole town.
Aunt Celia liked Beth because she really was a student and loved books. Molly’s eldest aunt spent her days in a comfortable chair in her own sitting room, reading—and reading the solid, not to say stolid works of certain English authors who have mostly gone out of fashion in this day.
Aunt Catherine—almost always suffering from a cold in the head and never by any possibility going out of doors without overshoes—was considered delicate by all the family. She confided to Beth her favorite remedies for most diseases, from cholera to housemaid’s knee.
Auntie Cora was society’s devotee—a little, bustling woman, who was the cheerfulest company and never talked of anything that amounted (so Aunt Celia said) to “a row of beans.” She took Beth and Molly to afternoon teas to show them off, and drove with them in borrowed coupés behind stiff-backed coachmen and footmen through the pleasant roads around Hambro.
Aunt Carrie, the maritime one, took Beth to her room and displayed for her admiration much of the wedding finery she had been preparing with her own hands through a series of heart-hungering years, against the time when her captain should come home and settle down.
“John has not had his own ship very long. He must first lay aside a competence—and for years he had a father and a mother to support. But this voyage to the East and one more will ‘complete the tally,’ he says,” and she blushed very prettily, for she was a sweet maiden lady with all the modesty of a girl.
On a teakwood table in a corner of her room—a present from the captain, of course—was a mariner’s chart on which every day was faithfully pricked the possible course of the ship Rollingsgate—a huge fourmaster.
“I correct it by John’s letters,” Aunt Carrie said. “And really, it is quite surprising to see how close I come to it—sometimes.”
She had learned the elements of navigation, too, so as to know more about John’s calling. To Beth’s mind this romance of the maiden lady was the very sweetest of which she had ever heard.