She reflected then that perhaps she shouldn’t have said anything so personal, but Aunt Eunice didn’t at all mind. Instead she smiled one of her shining smiles, and there even came a little fleck of pink into her soft old cheeks. She bent to kiss Caroline, and suddenly, because she just couldn’t help it, Caroline put her arms round Aunt Eunice and hugged her, and Aunt Eunice hugged her back. You don’t know how good that seemed to Caroline. There had been no one to hug her since her mother died. Cousin Delia was a very busy woman, and then, too, alongside the four babies, Caroline doubtless seemed to her quite grown up, and too old to need cuddling.
Hand in hand Aunt Eunice and Caroline went down the long curved stair and through the stately hall into the dining room. Cousin Penelope was already there and the glass coffee machine, which Caroline found as fascinating as any mechanical toy, was distilling an amber-hued, fragrant liquid. They sat down at once to another of those well-ordered meals that filled Caroline with amazement—almost with awe. She hadn’t known that food could be so good.
There were great red strawberries, which still wore their green elf caps, and little glass dishes of powdered sugar, into which you dipped the berries daintily, after a swift glance to see how Cousin Penelope did it. Then there were bowls of crisp cereal, with rich cream, and bacon, so thin and so deftly cooked that it crumbled into savory slivers under your fork. There were thin slices of brown toast, piping hot, and there were wee muffins of bran, which came to the table in a silver dish, wrapped cozily in a fine white napkin. There were little balls of fresh butter, and in a bewitching jar, shaped like a beehive, there was strained honey. All the milk to drink, too, that one could want. And would Jacqueline like an egg for her breakfast?
“Thank you, no, please,” murmured Jacqueline’s understudy, and then, remembering the cold egg that she had lately eaten from the shoe box, she added: “I—I’m not extra fond of eggs.”
“Neither am I,” Cousin Penelope said heartily.
Funny, thought Caroline, that Cousin Penelope should be so pleased at every resemblance between them, but very nice of her. In time she thought she should like Cousin Penelope, though never so much as she loved Aunt Eunice.
After breakfast Aunt Eunice asked Caroline to come walk with her in the garden, and said, yes, she could bring Mildred. So Mildred, in her pink-sprayed frock and white bonnet, and Aunt Eunice and Caroline walked soberly in the shadiest parts of the garden. Aunt Eunice wore a broad hat, tied under her chin with wide streamers of lawn. She paused once to give directions to Frank, who was gardener as well as chauffeur, and much more human in khaki overalls than Caroline had thought him the day before in his imposing uniform.
Aunt Eunice showed Caroline all the special beauties of the garden—her new rosebushes and her old thrifty plot of perennials, the pear trees that later would furnish them fruit more delicious, Aunt Eunice believed, than any they could buy in the shops, and the row of gooseberry bushes, where the berries already were setting in tiny, reddish furry blobs.
At the farther side of the garden they sat down in a little rustic summer house, covered with woodbine. Caroline gazed with all her eyes at the scene before her—the garden with its bright flowers of early summer, blues and pinks and strong yellows, and its fruit trees, with gray-lined leaves of glossy green, its smooth white walks and dark edges of box, and beyond the garden the old white house, with its clustered chimnies, the elms that shaded it, the mountain far beyond, the blue sky over all. She thought it as breathlessly, chokingly lovely in its color and clear outline as the loveliest of the pictures in her room.
But Aunt Eunice looked nearer home. She took up Mildred, and carefully examined her clothes.