'But,' I expostulated, 'surely one might sometimes.' I looked round that wood. 'Why, daddy, I might say we were in fernal regions now, look at them all up that bank.'
Daddy looked amused and his eyes all curled up at the corners,—
'Well, darling, perhaps you're right, but you must always think of Devonshire if you do.'
Aunt Amelia said she didn't know what his dear, dead mother would say, after the Christian upbringing he had had, too. Daddy seemed inclined to lose his temper again and remarked that a certain kind of Christian upbringing was only another name for spiritual slavery. Aunt Amelia threw up her hands and said 'Shocking.' Then father whispered to mother that if Aunt Amelia didn't return to Hampstead soon he'd have to go into lodgings! He always says that if he's worried.
General conversation is apt to languish in Aunt Amelia's presence and to come back like a boomerang to some exhausting topic that most people never discuss. She understands father better now and thinks he's 'one of the right sort' because he happens to be an Evangelical, but she says he is 'dangerously charitable,' and always tries to find out if he's really sound on the subject of candles.
I remember once daddy, gently teasing, said,—
'But, dear Amelia, I thought it was your friends Ridley and Latimer who lighted a candle in England which should never be put out. If I were asked to celebrate at a church where they had lights what do you think I ought to do?'
And Amelia answered, 'I should hope you'd blow 'em out.' Then daddy said,—
'What a pearl you are, Amelia!' and laughed and kissed the stern old Calvinist. Somehow daddy could live with an Anabaptist or the Pope, and both would say, 'He's one of the right sort,' even though they'd disagreed with every single thing he'd said. Darling daddy!
CHAPTER IV