‘The Miss Hacket were sister or daughters or something to some old man who used to be clergyman here, and they are all married up but these two, and they’ve got the dearest little house you ever saw. They had a nephew in the 111th, and so they came and called on us at once. Miss Hacket is a regular old dear, but we none of us can bear Miss Constance, except that mamma says we ought to be sorry for her because she leads such a confined life. Miss Hacket and Aunt Jane always do go on so about the G.F.S. They both are branch secretaries, you know.’
‘I know! Aunt Jane did bother Mrs. Sefton so that she says she will never have another of those G.F.S. girls. She says it is a society for interference.’
‘Mamma likes it,’ said Mysie.
‘Oh! but she is only just come.’
‘Yes; but she always looked after the school children at Beechcroft before she married, and she and Alethea and Phyllis had the soldiers’ children up on Sunday. Alethea taught the little drummer boys, and they were so funny. I wonder who teaches them now! Gill always goes down to help Miss Hacket with her G.F.S. classes. She has one on Sunday afternoon, and one on Tuesday for sewing, and she is the only young lady in the place who can do plain needlework properly.’
‘Sewing-machines can work. What the use of fussing about it!’
‘They can’t mend,’ said Mysie. ‘Besides, do you know, in the American war, all the sewing-machines in the Southern States got out of order, and as all the machinery people were in the north, the poor ladies didn’t know what to do, and couldn’t work without them.’
‘Sewing-machines are a recent invention,’ said Dolores.
‘Oh! you didn’t think I meant the great old War of Independence. No, I meant the war about the slaves—secession they called it.’
‘That is not in the history of England,’ said Dolores, as if Mysie had no business to look beyond.