Miss Van Patten flushed. But she answered still quietly,
“I think you’re mistaken, Aunty. But even that—what would that matter?”
“Bah. You aren’t out of your swaddling-clothes as far as the world goes.”
The girl crept closer to her aunt. She placed her hand upon the thin shoulder.
“Aunty dear, if you found an old man bruised by the road, would you hesitate? Do we need a stranger to show us how just to be kind? That isn’t the way you’ve helped the poor with Dr. Merriweather.”
Aunt Philomela looked steadily into the young girl’s face.
“My dear,” she answered, “I’m seventy-two and you’re twenty-two.”
“Must I wait until I am your age before I’m human?”
“Perhaps—before you learn that you are human.”
Then the aunt asked an apparently irrelevant question,