"Yes, his new wife, thank heaven, is an American, and I reckon she wants to live at home." Then to herself, parenthetically, "I was always afraid he'd marry one of those frog-eating foreigners he's been trotting around with so long, and I must say I'm mightily surprised that he didn't."
She paused a moment and looked at Arethusa over her glasses as if Arethusa were the one to blame for this situation. Although the girl did not dare open her mouth in face of such an expression, she gave a little jump of impatience. It did seem as if Miss Eliza might finish telling It, and tell It straight, in some sort of order, if she were going to tell It at all.
"They want you to come visit them," repeated Miss Eliza, after her parenthesis and the little pause, "and your father's sent the money, as he says, for your 'immediate needs.' Over one hundred dollars it is. He says his wife gave it to him. She must be mighty well-off. 'Immediate needs,' indeed! I can buy your whole winter wardrobe with that money!"
Then once more did Arethusa rush recklessly in where angels would have feared to tread.
"Oh, Aunt 'Liza!..." A belated discretion came to her aid before she finished.
Miss Eliza frowned again. Her lips drew ominously down, and reprimand of some sort was plainly to be detected hovering there, but, for some obscure reason, she also changed her mind.
"Your Aunt 'Titia," she said, rather mildly, and thus apparently shifting all responsibility for any evil, which might ensue from this step to Miss Letitia's plumper shoulders, "your Aunt 'Titia has decided that so long as this is nearly August, there's no earthly use in your going to visit them until fall. So I'm going to write your father that. He may not like it, because he wants you right away, his letter says. But it would be downright foolishness to get you more summer clothes this late in the season; and you haven't near enough now, nor the right kind, to visit in a city. It's just like him, for all the world, this whole affair. Letting you alone for this long, and then all of a sudden wanting you to be bundled right off to him! You'll be needing winter clothes in a month or two," she finished decidedly, "so you're going in the fall." Then she added, much more to herself, however, than to Arethusa, "But I must say, I strongly doubt the wisdom of your going at all."
She settled back in her chair with the air of one having said her say, but leaving her niece with a feeling strongly resembling dissatisfaction.
Miss Eliza had simply flung these few facts at her without any elaboration; sketched in the bare outlines to what, viewed by Arethusa, a whole volume might be added without doing anywhere near full justice to the Subject. There was that matter of the "new wife," especially. One's only father does not get married every day, and to dismiss the lady of his choice by simply stating her existence does not gratify a thousandth part of natural curiosity. Her father, she knew, had written more than just the simple fact of his marriage. If he had done just that; then it was certainly not her father who had written the letter.
Miss Eliza had not told her when ... or where ... or....