“Oh the day when thou goest a-wooing,
Philip, my king.”
Meg was a little “put out,” as it is popularly called, this evening,—she was not generally so short with the young ones. The good fit had worn away during the endless process of darning, and she had jumped up at last, stuffed all the work into the gaping stocking-bag, and said to herself that eldest sisters were mistaken and wrongful institutions.
But that did not give Baby Essie her tea, nor yet put her lively little ladyship to bed; and since Esther was out, there was no one else to undertake it.
And when that was done Pip came in and asked her in his off-hand manner to “just put a stitch in that football blazer.”
[33]
]The stitch meant a hundred or two, for it was slit from top to bottom.
And then Esther came home—a quieter Esther, an Esther of less brilliant colouring than you used to know, for there are not many “fast colours” beneath Australian skies—and with her the Captain, grown more short-tempered with the lapse of years, and an income that did not grow with his family. And again it was “Meg.”
The seltzogene was empty. The Captain asked some one to tell him what was the use of having a grown-up daughter—he could not answer the question himself.
The lamb was a shade too much cooked, and the Golden Pudding a shade too little. He wanted to know whether Meg considered it below her to superintend domestic matters. In his young days girls, etc., etc. She went from the dinner-table at the end of the meal with hot cheeks.
“I never chose to be eldest—I was made so; and I don’t see I should be scapegoat for everything!” she said, sitting down on the arm of the lounge on which lay six feet of the superior sex in the shape of Pip.