"Don't expect us to throw away money, sis! She never writes 'cept when she is coming. Break the news, mum; is it to be a little stay of a year or more?"
Mrs. Westley lifted laughing eyes from the open letter.
"She says she will come next Wednesday to spend a few days with us. She is very sorry that that must be all—she is on her way to New York to consult a famous nerve specialist. She sends love to 'the beautiful children.'"
Jerry was very curious—no one had ever mentioned an Aunt Maria! So Gyp and Graham hastened to explain that Aunt Maria wasn't a real aunt but was "only" Isobel's godmother and something of a nuisance—to the younger Westleys.
"She doesn't give us presents," Graham concluded.
"She's forgotten all the things she 'did promise and vow' when Isobel was baptized. She had a fad, then, for godchildren; she used to go around picking out the girl babies who had blue eyes. She was a friend of Grandmother Duncan's and mother couldn't refuse her. She has nine altogether and always gives them the same things."
"And every time you see her she has a new fad," added Graham. "Once she was a suffragist but she switched because the suffs didn't serve tea at their meetings and the antis did. One time she was building a home for Friendless Females and another time she was organizing the poor underpaid shop girls, and the next——"
"Mother, listen," broke in Isobel. She had taken the letter from her mother and had been re-reading it. "She says she's going to France next spring and she's thinking about taking one of her godchildren with her. She's studying French and she wants us to talk French to her while she is here——"
"Well, I guess not! I'll eat in the kitchen," vowed Graham.
Gyp commenced to chuckle. "Let's say a whole lot of funny things in French—like when Sue Perkins translated 'the false teeth of the young man' and Mademoiselle sent her out of class."