"I speak thus for your own good, my Dickenson," said Aunt Clo, shaking a long forefinger. "You render yourself intolerable to the well-educated, and it is but a kindness to tell you so. Not only are you inexperienced, and therefore crude of outlook, but you are ignorant, self-assertive, stupidly bombastic, and talkative to a degree that——"
"Really, Miss Stellenthorpe, if you think I'm going to sit down under such rudeness——"
Doris's voice had risen instantly to the true virago's pitch of shrillness.
"Silence!" said Aunt Clo. "You disturb my niece. Perform the material duties, my Dickenson, for which I remark that you have been well trained, but cease to weary us with the trivialities of your conversation. En voilà assez, n'est-ce-pas?"
"I don't understand gibberish."
It was evident that Doris, after the manner of her kind, was recklessly seeking after rudeness for the sake of rudeness, regardless of wit or point. Miss Stellenthorpe raised her handsome eyebrows in an expression of patient despair.
"You perceive, my Lily? This girl—mal' educata indeed, as my beloved Italians say—knows neither her own language nor any other. What can you expect of such? Deplorable, oh deplorable!"
Aunt Clo looked at Miss Dickenson and shook her head repeatedly.
"Wretched one, have you never been taught that until you have learned the art of listening, you are unfit to talk? L'art d'ennuyer c'est de tout dire. That art, my unhappy Dickenson, you possess to the full. It is your only one. I come to this house—straight, I may tell you, from unravelling the many tangled threads of another's destiny—I come, and what do I find? What, I ask you, do I find? I find my niece, broken in body and spirit, needing the utmost cherishing, the greatest delicacy of handling, the reticence of true sympathy—and compelled instead to submit to your ministrations. You ask me, perhaps, to tell you fully and freely of what those ministrations consist."
"I don't ask you," cried Doris passionately. "I don't want to know what you think."