She grew to love her Aunt Carrie and Uncle James with the quiet voice and thin, damp hair.
Winter went by to the ticking of clocks and patter of rain. But there was snow after Christmas and uproarious snow-balling and slides in Galton High Street. There was always a fine crackling fire in the kitchen, and a sleek tabby cat, and copper kettles singing on the hob. There was Ethel's love affair with the grocer's assistant to talk and giggle over amid the tinkle and clatter of washing up the tea-things.
And then in March Mrs. Threadgale caught cold and died quite suddenly; and Jenny put some white violets on her grave and wore a black dress and went home to Islington.
The effect of this wonderful visit was not much more permanent than the surprise of a new picture-book. Galton had meant not so much a succession of revelations as a volley of sensations. She was sad at leaving the country; she missed the affection of her uncle and aunt. She missed the easy sway she had wielded over everybody at Galton. But she had very little experience to carry back to Hagworth Street. One would like to say she carried the memory of that childish wondertime right through her restless life, but, actually, she never remembered much about it. It very soon became merely a vague interval between two long similarities of existence, like a break in a row of houses that does not admit one to anything more than an added space of sky. She never communed with elves, or, like young Blake, saw God's forehead pressed against the window-pane. Jenny was no mystic of nature, and the roar of humanity would always move her more than the singing of waves and forest leaves.
Her great hold upon life was the desire of dancing. This she had fostered on many a level stretch of sward, with daisy chains hung all about her. She had danced with damson-stained mouth like a young Bacchante. She had danced while her companions made arches and hoops of slender willow-stems. She had danced the moon up and the sun down; and once, when the summer dusk was like wine cooled by woodland airs, when a nightingale throbbed in every roadside tree and glow-worms spangled the grass, she had taken a spray of eglantine and led an inspired band of childish revelers down into the twinkling lamplight of Galton.
Yet this wonderful year became a date in her chronicle chiefly because age or sunlight or wind tarnished her silver curls to that uncertain tint which is, unjustly to mice, always called mouse-colored; so that her arrival at Number Seventeen was greeted by a chorus of disapproval.
"Good gracious!" cried Mrs. Raeburn, when she saw her. "Will you only look at her hair?"
"What's gone with it?" asked Jenny.
"Why, what a terrible color. No color at all, you might say. I feel quite disgusted."
"Perhaps she won't be quite such a Miss Vain now," Ruby put in.