"Aunt Maria begged me to buy everything I wanted. She said, 'Now don't come home and say "I wish I had bought this, that, or the other." Get all that pleases you while you are there,'" Miss Dicks explained.
"You seem to have obeyed her most thoroughly," I remarked. "Does your aunt live with you at home?"
"Yes, I have no mother, you know," she said. "She died when I was a child. She nursed my little brother through scarlet fever. He died, and then she took it and died."
She told me this in the most matter-of-fact way; but somehow I felt differently towards her after she said that. I was feeling rather envious of the girl who had carte blanche to spend money so lavishly, and wondering what Olive and Peggy would say when they heard of it, but now I felt that, though we girls had so few of the things that money could buy, yet, as long as we had father and mother and one another, we were richer than Paulina Dicks.
When I had looked at everything, she startled me by saying:
"Now I want you to choose something for yourself."
My colour rose as I replied by saying hurriedly:
"Oh, no, I cannot do that!"
"Why not?" she asked, surveying me with frank surprise. "When you see that I have such heaps of things? I can never make use of them all myself." But I still decidedly declined.
"Take this coral necklace," she said. "You were admiring it, and it would look pretty on the black frock you wear of an evening. Why, what is the matter with you? Are you proud? I believe you are, for you never call me by my name, although I call you 'Nan.'"