Miss Letitia finished the hem of the blue dress and laid the garment carefully over the back of a chair. Then she reached over and took Arethusa's pile of stockings away from her.
"Suppose, dearie," she suggested, "you practise a bit now. You don't play that piece yet as well as you ought, and your father used to be a great lover of music. He will want to hear you play."
Arethusa rose obediently and went to the piano; twirled the squeaking stool to a lower height, and settled herself, elbows properly rigid and head upright. Miss Letitia was her music teacher.
In fact, all of her education, domestic and academic and purely ornamental, as Miss Eliza termed the music, had been gained at home. Instruction in the "principal branches," again Miss Eliza's name, had been received mostly from Miss Asenath. Geography she had taught her niece with the aid of the same faded globe that had fixed the shape of the world and the location of its hemispheres and continents and principal countries in her own mind. If the boundaries of any of those countries had changed since the globe was made; if new land had been discovered; if any hitherto obscure cities had sprung into size and prominence during the sixty years or more that the globe had stood in the corner of the square hall: it had made no sort of difference in the geography lessons. Arethusa had learned history, from ancient history books with almost obliterated names on the fly-leaves. But it had been rather a biased version of the period connected with the Civil War which she had learned, for Miss Eliza was very bitter about those years of her country's existence. Her only brother, and her twin, had been killed fighting for the Confederacy. Miss Eliza seemed to be unable to believe that he had been killed in battle, however, for she always spoke of him as "murdered" by the Yankees. So Arethusa's ideas of events connected with this time was hardly very favorably inclined towards the Northern side. Miss Asenath was very shaky in arithmetic; therefore, her pupil had not got into higher mathematics. She had paused in her figuring somewhere about the beginning of long division, but even where she had paused she could not be said to be very steadily fixed.
The musical part of this education belonged to just about the same date as the part which Miss Asenath had supervised. For all the pieces Arethusa had learned "by heart," which was the only way to learn music properly so as to be able to give pleasure to others, were pieces which Miss Letitia herself had practised with painstaking care for expression over fifty years ago. Both musicians were quite proficient in mazurkas and polkas and old-fashioned reels and ballads, and let us not forget to mention variations of every conceivable variety, for Miss Letitia possessed a whole book of variations, and it was quite a thick book.
Just at present, Arethusa was busily engaged in committing to memory "The Babbling Brook."
But her brook did not babble just precisely as Miss Letitia's did. There was something far more fantastic and wild about the runs the younger musician made on the tinkling square piano; runs which Miss Letitia considered were not at all in keeping with the character of the music she was playing. Effort had been expended by both to bring Arethusa's brook to the state of really flowing as a brook should flow; but it seemed so far to be hopeless.
Arethusa played it through once and Miss Letitia kept time for her with a threaded needle.
"No, dearie," she shook her head, "you don't get it at all. You play just a bit too fast sometimes, and not quite fast enough others."
So it was played all over again from the beginning by the pupil; but still it was no better. Miss Letitia looked troubled.