“And brushed your teeth?”
“Yes, auntie.”
“Good night, dearie. Sleep well.”
Aunt Beryl tucked her up and kissed her, and sometimes she said: “Sleep on your back and tuck in the clothes, and then the fleas won’t bite your toes.”
Then she went downstairs again, and Lydia never heard her and Uncle George going up to bed, for Grandpapa always refused to stir before twelve o’clock, and sometimes later, and it was necessary that both of them should wait so as to keep him company and eventually take him up to his room. The only variety in the week was Sunday, and even Sundays had their own routine. A later breakfast and a morning in church were succeeded by a heavy midday meal and a somnolent afternoon for Aunt Beryl and Grandpapa. Uncle George very often took Lydia for a long walk, in the course of which he became more than ever like Mr. Barlow, and would suddenly, while crossing the railway bridge, propound such inquiries as:
“Now, what do you suppose is meant by the word Tare, on the left-hand bottom corner of those trucks?”
Lydia very seldom knew the answer to these conundrums, but whether she did or no, she was sufficiently aware that no scientific precision of reply on her part would have given her uncle half the satisfaction that it did to enlighten her ignorance. Accordingly, she generally said demurely:
“I’ve often wondered, Uncle George. I should like to know what it means.”
She always listened to Uncle George’s accurate and painstaking explanations and tried to remember them. Suspecting extraordinary deficiencies in Aunt Beryl’s system of education, she was genuinely desirous of supplementing them whenever she could.
Her ambitions to acquire learning, accomplishments, and the achievement of extreme personal beauty, all of which seemed to her to be equally far from realization, were Lydia’s only troubles at Regency Terrace.