"I'm sorry to be late, Auntie."
"Well, one can't expect a budding virtuoso.... I suppose one should say virtuosa ... to be very punctual. And punctuality is fallen into disrepute among young people nowadays.... Now run up and take your things off like a good girl and come back quickly and talk to me so that we can have a good chat before the Turnstables come."
"Are they coming Auntie?"
"Yes, Cousin Jane Turnstable and her boy and girl are coming to dinner at half after one. It's quite thrilling to have so many young people in the house."
Running up the thickcarpeted stairs, Nan caught herself remembering running up those same stairs when she was still in short skirts, a Scotch plaid it was, accordionpleated, that day, and Mary Ann was polishing the brass rails that kept the carpet down, and her Aunt M., a tall omnipotent person then, had told her not to sing, O my darling Clementine, because it was a low vulgar song and somehow she hadn't been able to keep it in and had shouted out without meaning to:
Herring boxes without topses,
Sandals were for Clementine.
And Aunt M. had come out on the landing suddenly very cold and sharptoned and had made her stay in her room all afternoon and learn The Slave's Dream. As Nan went into the little room with Dutch blue wallpaper, which Aunt M. always called Nancibel's room, to throw her hat on the bed and give a hasty pat to her hair in front of the mirror,
Beside the ungathered rice he lay
His sickle in his hand,
bubbled up from somewhere deep in her mind. She smiled thinking how as the years had passed her relation to Aunt M. had changed, until now it was she who seemed the tall omnipotent person, skilled in all the world outside the house, and her aunt the timid one the housewalls protected from the shaggy world.
"Well, dear, what have you been up to all the week?" said Aunt M. when Nan had run down the stairs and back into the parlor. "I hope you haven't been gadding about a lot, like last week."