'Now, Rose-Marie, you do know why Mamma said "little."'
'It's a term of condescension?'
'And Engländerins are rather grand things to have in the house, you know—expensive, I mean. Always dearer than natives. Mamma only wants Cousin Mienchen to suppose we are well off.'
'Oh,' said I.
'You don't mind?' said Vicki, rather timidly taking my hand.
'It doesn't hurt me,' said I, putting a little stress on the me, a stress implying infinite possible hurt to Frau von Lindeberg's soul.
'It is horrid,' murmured Vicki, her head drooping over her book. 'I wish we didn't always pretend we're not poor. We are. Poor as mice. And it makes us so sensitive about it, so afraid of anything's being noticed. We spend our lives on tenterhooks—not nice things at all to spend one's life on.'
'Wriggly, uncomfortable things,' I agreed.
'I believe Cousin Mienchen isn't in the least taken in, for all our pains.'
'I don't believe people ever are,' said I; and we drifted into a consideration of the probable height of our temperatures and color of our ears if we could know how much the world we pose to really knows about us, if we could hear with what thoroughness those of our doings and even of our thoughts that we believed so secret are discussed.