“Oh, stuff!” Edwin contradicted her curtly. “She can’t be anything like as much as that.”
Having by this positive and sharp statement disposed of the question of Mrs Hamps’s age, he bent again with eagerness to his newspaper. The “Manchester Examiner” no longer existing as a Radical organ, he read the “Manchester Guardian,” of which that morning’s issue contained a long and vivid obituary of Charles Stewart Parnell.
Brother and sister were at breakfast. Edwin had changed the character of this meal. He went fasting to business at eight o’clock, opened correspondence, and gave orders to the wonderful Stifford, a person now of real importance in the firm, and at nine o’clock flew by car back to the house to eat bacon and eggs and marmalade leisurely, like a gentleman. It was known that between nine and ten he could not be seen at the shop.
“Well,” Maggie continued, with her mild persistence, “Aunt Spenser told me—”
“Who’s Aunt Spenser, in God’s name?”
“You know—mother’s and auntie’s cousin—the fat old thing!”
“Oh! Her!” He recalled one of the unfamiliar figures that had bent over his father’s coffin.
“She told me auntie was either fifty-five or fifty-six, at father’s funeral. And that’s nearly three and a half years ago. So she must be—”
“Two and a half, you mean.” Edwin interrupted with a sort of savageness.
“No, I don’t. It’s nearly three years since Mrs Nixon died.”