Here the editor came in.
“You don’t want to be sentimental either,” Kitty went on; “do you—Mr Editor?”
The editor looked a little doubtful.
“I want to be happy, at any rate,” said he, “and I mean to be.”
“And he can’t be happy unless you smile on him. Smile on him, Auntie!” cried a new, radiant Kitty, to whom aunts no longer presented any terrors. “Say ‘Bless you, my children!’ Auntie—do!”
“Get along with your nonsense!” said Aunt Eliza. Or was it Aunt Kate?
VIII
MISS MOUSE
They were poor, not with the desperate poverty that has to look on both sides of a penny, but with the decent bearable poverty that must look at a shilling with attention, and with respect at half-a-crown. There was money for the necessities of life, the mother said, but no money to waste. This was what she always tried to say when Maisie came in with rainbow representations of the glories of local “sales” piteous pictures of beautiful things going almost for nothing—things not absolutely needed, but which would “come in useful.” Maisie’s dress was never allowed those touches of cheap finery which would have made it characteristic of her. Her clothes were good, and she had to patch and mend and contrive so much that sometimes it seemed to her as though all her life was going by in the effort to achieve, by a distasteful process, a result which she abhorred. For her artistic sense was too weak to show her how the bright, soft freshness of her tints gained by contrast with the dull greys and browns and drabs that were her mother’s choice—good wearing colours, from which the pink and white of her face rose triumphantly, like a beautiful flower out of a rough calyx.