Anania looked on with envious eyes.
“How good lady must de Countess be!” added Agnes.
“Oh, she can be good to folks sometimes,” snarled Anania. “She’s just as full of whims as she can be—all those great folks are—proud and stuck-up and crammed full of caprice: but they say she’s kind where she takes, you know. It just depends whether she takes to you. She never took to me, worse luck! I might have had that good robe, if she had.”
“I shouldn’t think she would,” suddenly observed the smallest voice in the company.
“What do you mean by that, you impudent child?”
“Because, Cousin Anania, I don’t think there’s much in you to take to.”
Derette’s prominent feeling at that moment was righteous indignation. She could not bear to hear the gentle, gracious lady, who had treated her with such unexpected kindness, accused of being proud and full of whims, apparently for no better reason than because she had not “taken to” Anania—a state of things which Derette thought most natural and probable. Her sense of justice—and a child’s sense of justice is often painfully keen—was outraged by Anania’s sentiments.
“Well, to be sure! How high and mighty we are! That comes of visiting Countesses, I suppose.—Aunt Isel, I told you that child was getting insufferable. There’ll be no bearing her very soon. She’s as stuck-up now as a peacock. Just look at her!”
“I don’t see that she looks different from usual,” said Isel, who was mixing the ingredients for a “bag-pudding.”
Anania made that slight click with her tongue which conveys the idea of despairing compassion for the pitiable incapacity of somebody to perceive patent facts.