"How old are you, mum? You'll hexcuse me askin' you."
I hesitated. Were Amelia to know that I was two years her senior would she despise me more than ever?
"Never mind, mum. No ladies likes to tell their ages. In my last place—Tompkinses'—the oldest daughter, Miss Julia, used to begin a chatterin' to the canary for all she was worth when anybody so much as mentions how old they was, and the way time was passin'. New Year's Eve was the worst, when the bells was tollin'. I've known her wake that poor canary up, when it had gone to bed, and say, 'Dicky, Dicky, pretty Dick,' and it thought the incandescent light was the sun, and had its bath straight away."
"Oh, I'm not so bad as that," I laughed, "I'm twenty-three!"
Amelia blacked her face more than ever in her surprise.
"Bless my soul! Who'd have thought it? In that white dress you wears at night you looks like a bit of a thing who has just got out of pinifores. Twenty-three! You're older than me, and never seed a flue-brush before."
"Perhaps you have always been brought up with them?" I suggested.
"I could handle one at six, or my mother would have let me know what for."
She swelled with pride at the retrospection of her infant capabilities.
"You were evidently most clever. Perhaps you were born grown up. Some people are."