“H’m! I daresay they are like other girls; a little bit of learning, and a great deal of dress, eh?” Priscilla coloured.
“There are all sorts of girls at St. Benet’s,” she said after a pause. “Some are real students, earnest, devoted to their work.”
“Have you earned any money yet, Prissie?” exclaimed Hattie. “For if you have, I do want— look—” She thrust a small foot, encased in a broken shoe, prominently into view.
“Hattie, go to bed this minute!” exclaimed Aunt Raby. “Go up to your room all three of you little girls. No more words—off at once, all of you. Prissie, you and I will go into the drawing-room, and I’ll lie on the sofa, while you tell me a little bit about your college life.”
“Aunt Raby always lies oh the sofa in the evenings now,” burst from Hattie the irrepressible.
Miss Peel rushed after the plump little girl, and pushed her out of the room.
“To bed, all of you!” she exclaimed. “To bed, and to sleep! Now, Prissie, you are not to mind a word that child says. Come into the drawing-room, and let us have a few words quietly. Oh, yes, I’ll lie on the sofa, my dear, if you wish it. But Hattie is wrong; I don’t do it every night. I suffer no pain either, Prissie. Many a woman of my age is racked with rheumatics.”
The last words were said with a little gasp. The elder woman lay back on the sofa, with a sigh of relief. She turned her face so that the light from the lamp should not reveal the deathly tired lines round it.
Aunt Raby was dressed in a rough homespun garment. Her feet were clad in unbleached cotton stockings, also made at home; her little, iron-grey curls lay flat at each side of her hollow cheeks. She wore list slippers, very coarse and common in texture. Her whole appearance was the essence of the homely, the old-fashioned, even the ungainly.
Priscilla had seen elegance and beauty since she went away; she had entered into the life of the cultivated, the intellectually great. In spite of her deep affection for Aunt Raby, she came back to the ugliness and the sordid surroundings of home with a pang which she hated herself for feeling. She forgot Aunt Raby’s sufferings for a moment in her uncouthness. She longed to shower riches, refinement, beauty upon her.