“My aunts? no, indeed! Whatever are you thinking of, Florence? My aunts were most respectable women, and wore bonnets, when bonnets was bonnets. Hats, indeed!”
“Your hat was in the fashion then, and mine’s in the fashion now,” said Florence saucily; but Aunt Lizzie, refusing to perceive that her niece had made a point, continued, “Aunt Eliza Brown was married to a man in the grocery way, and Aunt Warren, as you very well know, was housekeeper to Mr Cunningham at Ashcroft Hall, and married the head keeper, which her son has the situation to this day.”
“I do tell Florrie,” said the elder sister again, “that she’d look a deal more like a real lady if she dressed a bit quieter than she does.”
“I don’t want to look like a lady. I want to have my fun,” said Florrie. “Come on, Ethel, if you’re coming; I want to catch up with Carrie and Ada. Good-bye, aunt; I like lessons best in school.”
And off dashed Florrie through the summer sunshine, between the avenue of monuments, her hair flying, her skirts swinging, and her loud lively voice sounding behind and before her as she scurried along.
“Well!” said Aunt Lizzie, “she be a one, surely. That girl wants a tight hand over her, Martha Jane, if ever a girl die yet.”
Aunt Lizzie—otherwise Mrs Stroud—was an excellent person, and had “kept her brother’s family together,” as she expressed it, ever since their mother’s death; but she was not invariably pleasant, and her eldest niece disliked being called Martha Jane much more than Florence disliked being scolded for her finery. When all the younger ones had such beautiful names—Maud Florence Nellie, Ethel Rosamond, and Sybil Eva Constance—it was hard upon her that she had been born before her mother’s love of reading, and perhaps her undeveloped love of the beautiful things of life, had overcome the family traditions. “Martha” was bad enough, and she did not know that the children’s use of “Matty” was a fashionable variation of it. But “Martha Jane!”
She was not, however, saucy like Florence, so she only sighed a little and said:
“I do my best, indeed, aunt; but won’t you lay off your mantle and sit down comfortably? Father won’t be in yet. He likes to be round, when so many friends come to visit the graves and put flowers, in case of mischief, and the children won’t be back for near two hours.”
Mrs Stroud was a stout comfortable woman, not very unlike what her niece Florence might be after five and thirty more years in a workaday world had marked and subdued her beaming countenance. She was glad to sit down after the hot walk, take off her cloth mantle, which, though an eminently dignified and respectable garment, was rather a heavy one for a June day, and fan herself with her pocket-handkerchief, while she inquired into the well-being of her nieces and nephews. Martha Jane was of a different type—dark and slim, with pretty, rather dreamy grey eyes, and a pale refined face. She was a good girl, and tried to do her duty by her young brothers and sisters; but she had not very strong health or spirits, and in many ways she wished that her life was different from what fate had made it.