The red sun was in a station over the tree tops in the east, and sent cold rays across the winter vapours of the park through one corner of my window. I sipped my chocolate, and hoped the rebel was not abroad yet.
“He is,” the maid said; “nought would restrain him. At seven o’clock he knocked me up and made me get him towels and cold water for his tub; at eight o’clock, my lady, he made me paint his face, friz his hair a bit, put his head-dress on, and arrange all the points in what he called his ‘feminine machinery’; at nine he was drinking ale and eating of his breakfast; and ten minutes since I saw him in the morning room teaching my Lady Grimstone’s polly-parrot to swear like anything.”
“Oh,” says I, “a very pretty occupation to be sure. Here, girl, put me in my déshabille, and let me be upon him ere he’s at a further mischief. Quick, wench, or next we shall have him teaching hymns to my papa.”
Half an hour hence I went downstairs to keep a personal eye upon him. I had not been there five minutes when my aunt’s maid, Tupper, came in and said that her mistress required my presence in her room immediately. As the message was so peremptory I dallied some five-and-twenty minutes longer than I need, for I think that persons of an elderly habit should never be encouraged in their arbitrary courses. Had I only foreseen what lay in store when I obeyed this summons, I should have taken my muff and tippet with me to protect myself from frostbite. You may have seen an iceberg clad in all its severities of snow, sitting in a temperature that makes you shiver. If you have had this felicity you have also seen my aunt, the dowager, this wintry morning. She smiled a December sun-glint when she saw me.
“Barbara, good morning,” she began.
“Good morning, ma’am,” says I, and curtsied.
“I trust you are very well,” my aunt says.
“Very well indeed, ma’am,” I answered modestly. I’ll confess a little nerve-twitch. ’Twas a charming idiosyncrasy of my aunt’s that she only betrayed an interest in one’s health when she was about to administer a pill of one sort or another. She was about to administer one just now—a blue one!
“I have sent for you, Barbara,” says the dowager, in shivery thin tones that were like cold water trickling down one’s spine, “to inform you that your dear friend, Miss Prudence Canticle, your ownest Prue, the dearest Prue that ever was, the precious Prue, to whom all the world is but as a china tea-cup, is just a man, and a very pretty scoundrel.”
An elderly lady of six-and-fifty winters, whose face is Arctic, and is framed, moreover, in corkscrew curls that look horribly like icicles, can throw an extraordinary stress and feeling in the mild word, “man.” And this instant, such an amount did my aunt employ that a feather might have knocked me down.