But Aunt Dinah, with many thanks, said, “No,” peremptorily, and wilful man or woman, who will contend with?
So, like the awful banquet in Macbeth, Miss Dinah Perfect’s tea-party broke down and up, and the guests, somewhat scared, got into their walking wrappers, rather silently, and their entertainer remained behind unstrung and melancholic.
But William Maubray, who came down to assist in the rummage for cloaks and umbrellas, asked leave, in his blunt modest way, to accompany Miss Letty and her brother, the doctor, to Saxton.
Now there seemed something real and grisly in Aunt Dinah’s terror, which a little infected William Maubray; and the little party marched in silence along the frost-hardened road, white in moonlight, with the bare switch-like shadows of the trees across it, on their way to the pretty old town of Saxton.
At last the doctor said—
“She won’t miss you, do you think?”
“She told me she’d like to be quiet for half an hour, and I should be so much obliged if you could tell me, whether you really, that is, still think that she ought to have a medical man in attendance to-night.”
“Why, you know what hysteria is. Well, she is in a highly hysterical state. She’s a woman who resists; it would be safer, you see, if she gave way and cried a bit now and then, when nature prompts, but she won’t, except under awful high pressure, and then it might be serious; those things sometimes run off into fits.”
And so the doctor lectured William upon his aunt’s nerves, until they had arrived at the door of his snug house in the High Street.
Here they shook hands; but William Maubray, who was unhappy about Aunt Dinah, after Miss Letty had mounted to her chamber, very urgently entreated the doctor to return and see how it might end.