“Matter! That stuff was TOOTH-POWDER, that’s what it was. Your Cousin Myra broke the bottle her tooth-powder was in when she was here last winter and I gave her that old can to keep it in. She forgot to take it when she went away and I put it on that top shelf. I declare you must all have been bewitched yesterday.”
Poor, poor Felicity! If she had not always been so horribly vain over her cooking and so scornfully contemptuous of other people’s aspirations and mistakes along that line, I could have found it in my heart to pity her.
The Story Girl would have been more than human if she had not betrayed a little triumphant amusement, but Peter stood up for his lady manfully.
“The rusks were splendid, anyhow, so what difference does it make what they were raised with?”
Dan, however, began to taunt Felicity with her tooth-powder rusks, and kept it up for the rest of his natural life.
“Don’t forget to send the Governor’s wife the recipe for them,” he said.
Felicity, with eyes tearful and cheeks crimson from mortification, rushed from the room, but never, never did the Governor’s wife get the recipe for those rusks.
CHAPTER VII. WE VISIT COUSIN MATTIE’S
One Saturday in March we walked over to Baywater, for a long-talked-of visit to Cousin Mattie Dilke. By the road, Baywater was six miles away, but there was a short cut across hills and fields and woods which was scantly three. We did not look forward to our visit with any particular delight, for there was nobody at Cousin Mattie’s except grown-ups who had been grown up so long that it was rather hard for them to remember they had ever been children. But, as Felicity told us, it was necessary to visit Cousin Mattie at least once a year, or else she would be “huffed,” so we concluded we might as well go and have it over.