“You shall see just as little of them all as you like, dear,” said Lady Jane. “You can breakfast and lunch in your morning-room, and just come down to dinner when you feel equal to being with us, and then you will see the darlings at dessert. I know they will cheer you, with their pretty little ways. Such loving pets as they are too, and so full of intelligence. Did I tell you what Johnnie said yesterday, at lunch?”
“Yes, dear Lady Jane, you did tell me. It was very funny,” replied Juanita, with a faint smile.
She could not tell that adoring grandmother that the children were a burden to her, and that those intelligent speeches and delightful mispronunciations of polysyllabic words which convulsed parents and grandparent seemed to add perceptibly to her own gloom. She pretended to be interested in Tom’s letter from Eton with a modest request for a large hamper, and she made a martyr of herself by showing Susie picture-books, and explaining the pictures, or by telling Lucy her favourite Hans Andersen story, which never palled upon that young listener.
“Don’t you think you would like a new one?” Juanita would ask.
“No, no, not a new one—the same, please. I want ‘The Proud Darning Needle.’”
So the adventures of “The Proud Darning Needle” had to be read or related as the case might be.
Juanita took Lady Jane’s advice and spent the greater part of every day in her morning-room, that room which had been Godfrey’s den. It was further from the staircase than any other sitting-room, and the clatter and the shrill voices were somewhat modified by distance. The house-party amused themselves after their hearts’ desire, and worked the horses with the true metropolitan feeling that a horse is an animal designed for locomotion, and that he can’t have too much of it. Lady Jane was the most indulgent of deputy hostesses, and spent all breakfast time in cutting sandwiches of a particularly dainty kind for her sons-in-law, so that they might be sustained between the luxurious home breakfast at nine, and the copious luncheon with which the cart met the shooters by appointment at half-past one. When the shooters had started there were the little Grenvilles to slave for; and Lady Jane spent another half-hour in seeing them off upon their morning constitutional, Lucy on her Shetland, and Johnnie, Susie, and Godolphin on their short little legs, with groom and nurses in attendance. There were so many wraps to be adjusted, so many injunctions to be given to nurses and groom, so many little pockets to be filled with gingerbreads and queen-cakes, while Mrs. Grenville looked on, and protested against grandmamma’s infraction of hygienic rules. Dr. Dobson Drooce had said they must never eat between meals.
Juanita rarely appeared before afternoon tea, when she was generally installed in her own particular easy-chair by the fire, fenced round by a seven-leaved Indian screen, which was big enough to include a couple of small tables and a creepie stool, before the sisters-in-law came in from their afternoon drive, or the shooters dropped in after their day in the woods. There were no other guests than the sisters and their husbands; and it was an understood thing that no one else should be asked, unless it were Lord and Lady Cheriton, the Dalbrooks from Dorchester, or Mr. Scarsdale.
No one could have been sweeter than the young widow was to her visitors during the hours she spent with them, listening with inexhaustible patience to Jessica Grenville’s graphic account of the measles as lately “taken” by her whole brood, with all the after consequences of the malady, and the amount of cod-liver oil and quinine consumed by each patient; pretending to be interested in Ruth Morningside’s perpetual disquisitions upon smart people and smart people’s frocks; and in every way performing her duty as a hostess.
And yet George Grenville was not altogether satisfied.