And they did, from side-board, window-seat, and mantelpiece, without comment and with equanimity. And be it remarked it was excellent food. And excellently cooked. Trust a Bruce for that! They surprised you by such unexpected characteristics as knowing good food and having it!
Another day Aunt Juanita departed betimes for the printer, leaving the others at their tasks.
"What? What's that, Maud?" from Mrs. Higginson presently, looking about her as she stood up, tying on her bonnet, "Mrs. Bruce told you to get those circulars to the post-office when you finish them? Why there's five hundred of them! That's Juanita Bruce! Go home and get your lunches, both of you, and I'll send the carriage around here for you. It can take you to the office with the circulars, and wherever you'd like to go afterwards. Girls always have a round of calls to pay. Use it for the afternoon."
And the Higginson carriage meant a pair as well and coachman and footman and liveries!
"The greenhouses are going to waste," said this lady another day, "waiting for weather to get the flowers out into the beds. Come back in the carriage to lunch with me, both of you, and let the gardener cut you what you want." And the Higginson house meant pictures brought from abroad, and wonderful rugs, and articles of what Maud once inadvertently called virtue! The clerical force were thrilled and enraptured with their secretarial occupation!
And it would seem, too, that the time was ripe for the cause which Aunt Juanita and Mrs. Higginson were furthering. Selina for proof of this had only to take the cases of her mother and Auntie.
Mail from the outer and impersonal world, coming to either of these two, was so infrequent as to be negligible, their correspondence being altogether personal and intimate. When such mail began to come to both, circulars, and clippings and marked newspapers, despite the fact that their own Selina, or if not she, then Maud, was known to have directed them, they were impressed and fluttered, and put their sewing aside, needles in work, thimbles on sills, read it through with absorption and remark and comment.
"'The Ladies' Library Club of Kalamazoo' is the oldest organization of the kind in the West," Mrs. Wistar would read aloud. "'Four book clubs recently were formed in the State of Pennsylvania.' I'm sure such affairs must be altogether beneficial in communities. We think too little no doubt of the things of the mind. Cultivation along such lines as would be proper in a book club would be stimulating for us all here in our community. Now take Anna, for instance," she referred to Cousin Anna Tomlinson on whom she turned thus testily every now and then, "no matter where she is, or what the occasion, she never wants to talk about anything now but the dishonesty or the appetites of her servants. It's come to be wearing."
"'The Cosmos Club of West Newburyport, Mass.,'" read Auntie whose vocabulary was circumscribed and confined to the familiar, darling soul, and who conceived of cosmos only as pink and white and magenta, grown on bushes and brought in in the fall and put about in vases, "Now I'd like to see something like a cosmos club started here among ourselves. I've always said it was an excellent plan to exchange seeds and cuttings and ideas with other flower lovers."