"We are warning you."
"Well, don't sit nodding there like three crows; your cursing will come to nothing, because you don't know nothing about London, nor about life, nor about nothing. What's the good of joring about the way to Heaven, when you don't know the way to Liverpool Street without asking a policeman? I say Jenny shall be happy. I say she shall be jolly and merry and laugh when she's a mind to, bless her, and never come to no harm with her mother to look after her. She sha'n't be a Plain Jane and No Nonsense, with her hair screwed back like a broom, but she shall be Jenny, sweet and handsome, with lips made for kissing and eyes that will sparkle and shine like six o'clock of a summer morning."
Mrs. Raeburn was sitting up in bed, holding high the unconscious infant.
"And she shall be happy, d'ye hear? And you sha'n't have her, so get out, and don't wag your bonnets at my Jenny."
The three aunts looked at each other.
"I see the footprints of Satan in this room," said Miss Horner.
"Not a bit of it," contradicted her niece. "It's your own muddy feet."
Outside, a German band, seduced from hibernation by St. Luke's summer, played the "March of the Priests" from "Athalie," leaving out the more important notes, and soon a jaded omnibus, with the nodding bonnets of the three Miss Horners, jogged slowly back to Clapton.
When the Miss Horners withdrew from the dingy bedroom the swish and rustle of their occupation, Mrs. Raeburn was at first relieved, afterwards indignant, finally anxious.
Could this strawberry-colored piece of womanhood beside her really be liable to such a life of danger and temptation and destruction? Could this wide-eyed stolidity ever become a spark to set men's hearts afire? Would those soft, uncrumpling hands know some day love's fever? No, no, her Jenny should be a home-bird—always a home-bird, and marry some nice young chap who could afford to give her a comfortable house where she could smile at children of her own, when the three old aunts had moldered away like dry sticks of lavender. All that babble of flames and hell was due to religion gone mad, to extravagant perusal of brass-bound Bibles, to sour virginity. With some perception of human weakness, Mrs. Raeburn began to realize that her aunts' heads were full of heated imaginations because they had never possessed an outlet in youth. The fierce adventures of passion had been withheld from them, and now, in old age, they were playing with fires that should have been extinguished long ago. Fancy living with those terrible old women at Clapton, hearing nothing but whispers of hell-fire. All that talk of looking after Jenny's soul was just telling the tale. There must be some scheme behind it all. Perhaps they wanted to save money in a servant, and thought to bring on Jenny by degrees to a condition of undignified utility.