“Mrs. Ranger—you mean the woman that smokes?”
Miss Trueman's tone brought vividly to the mind a person dangling from disgusted finger-tips a mouse or beetle.
“For heaven's sake, Aunt Jule”—in moments of intense exasperation they reverted unconsciously to the old form—“don't speak of her as if she smoked for a living!”
“I should rather not speak of her at all,” said Miss Trueman severely.
They raised their eyebrows helplessly: Carolyn's irritation was so unfeigned that she omitted a justly famous shrug.
For two years they had devoted an appreciable part of their busy hours to modifying Aunt Julia's antique prejudices, developing in her the latent aesthetic sense that their Wednesday art class taught them existed in every one, cajoling her into a tolerance of certain phases of modern literature considered seriously and weekly by the Monday Afternoon Club, and incidentally utilizing her as a chaperon and housekeeper in their modest up-town apartment.
The first six months of her sojourn had been almost entirely occupied with accustoming herself to the absence of an attic and a cellar; long days of depression they learned, finally, to trace to this incredible source. Later she dealt with the problem of subsisting from eight till one on two rolls and a cup of coffee; successfully, in the ultimate issue, as surreptitious bits of fried ham and buckwheat cakes, with suspicious odors, winked at discreetly by her nieces, witnessed. It would have been unkind, as Elise suggested, to criticise Aunt Ju-ju's performances at the ungodly hour of seven in the morning, when their own correctly Continental repast, flanked by a chrysanthemum in a tall vase, not only tallied so accurately with their digestive and aesthetic necessities, but appeared, moreover, with such gratifying regularity one hour later.
Both Carolyn and her sister had inherited from their mother, Miss True-man's older sister, a real gift for teaching, and this, rather than their respective abilities in art and music, enabled them to impart very successfully the elements of these necessary branches to the young ladies of a fashionable boarding-school just outside the city.
It was politely regretted by their friends that they were unable to give themselves unreservedly to the exercise of their art without the cramping necessity for teaching; but it is probable that both the girls estimated their not too extraordinary talents very sensibly, though far from displeased by a more flattering judgment.
Miss Trueman, who possessed the characteristic veneration of the bred and born New Englander for his native or imported school-ma'am, resented persistently their somewhat patronizing attitude toward the profession second only to the ministry in her stanch respect. A little of the simple grandeur of those childhood days when “the teacher boarded with them” clung with the ineradicable force of habit to her mind, and she could not understand their restive attitude at “the fine positions as teachers Hattie's girls have got.”