"Mercy on us! How awful! That was so near. Sister 'Liza, you'd better get a pillow! 'Thusa...!"
Always, in a storm, one of Miss Letitia's first duties was to bulwark Miss Asenath who could not get pillows for herself, and so the latter was almost buried in them. Miss Asenath passed one of her many over to Arethusa, who sat on it obediently. Then the gentle creature on the couch rewarded her with a pat; by this conveying her loving intelligence of just how much the sitting on the hot, stuffy protection Miss Letitia insisted upon was hated, and her recognition of the magnanimity of doing so with murmuring. But it was Miss Asenath's way to make anything but good behaviour in her immediate vicinity well-nigh impossible.
Next, she reached over and took the Christian Observer from Arethusa's hot grasp, and began herself to fan the overheated girl very slowly and quietly.
"If you sit quite still, dear," she said softly, "you'll cool off in just a moment."
Miss Eliza's sturdy uprightness disdained the "safety first" aid of pillows. She was a fatalist.
"If I'm struck, then I'm struck," she said, with the finality that admits of no argument.
Arethusa sat quietly on her hassock and under Miss Asenath's gentle regularity of fanning she cooled off gradually, but her impatience was in no wise abated. Father's letter was still undiscussed; and Arethusa wished that Miss Eliza would hurry and tell her about it, and what he had said. She seemed so very much longer than usual in getting started on what her niece considered the most burning question of the hour.
She told Miss Letitia about the fall of the bird's nest which she had noticed on her trip to get Arethusa, and Miss Letitia agreed with her sister that it was a blessing that the wind had blown it down before it rained, else the gutter would surely have flooded again. They discussed with zeal the advisability of putting wire netting over the gutter end to keep those birds from re-building, and the length of time the storm was in actually coming. Miss Letitia ventured the prediction that it was to be a hard rain and she certainly hoped that Blish had remembered to put the barrels under that broken place in the north-east water spout to catch all the rain-water that was possible: and Miss Eliza replied with asperity that if he had not remembered it, he would find himself sorry. But she really considered it decidedly remiss in Jere Conway not to have fixed that spout weeks ago; she herself had told him about it on her last visit to town. Jere Conway was getting lazier and lazier as he got older and less attentive to business. Although she hated very much to employ a strange man, still if he put off much longer fixing that spout, she was going to send for the new tin-smith at the Junction.
Finally, Arethusa felt that she could not stand all this irrelevancy another second; her impatient longing had to be expressed.
"Please, Aunt 'Liza, what did Father say?"