“Well done, Rosie! If only Harry could hear you!”
“I have often wished that Hilda could see and hear you both over this little mortal. You should see Hilda. Does not she preserve her equanimity? Fancy her walking the room for hours with any of her boys, as you did the other night with this one. Not she, indeed, nor any one else, with her permission.”
“I thought—I am sure you have always spoken about Hilda as a model mother,” said Fanny, doubtfully.
“And a fond mother,” said Graeme.
“She is a model mother; she is fond, but she is wise,” said Rose, nodding her head. “I say no more.”
“Fanny dear, we shall have to learn of Rose. We are very inexperienced people, I fear,” said Graeme, smiling.
“Well, I daresay even I might teach you something. But you should see Hilda and her babies. Her eldest son is three years old, and her second will soon be two, and her daughter is four months. Suppose she had begun by walking all night with each of them, and by humouring every whim?”
And then Rose began her talk with the baby again, saying all sorts of things about the fond foolishness of his little mamma and his Aunt Graeme, that it would not have been at all pretty, she acknowledged, to say to themselves. Graeme listened, smiling, but Fanny looked anxious.
“Rose,” said she, “tell me about Hilda’s way. I want to have the very best way with baby. I know I am not very wise, but I do wish to learn and to do right!”
Her words and her manner reminded Rose so forcibly, by contrast, of the Fanny whose vanity and self-assertion had been such a vexation so often, that, in thinking of those old times, she forgot to answer her, and sat playing with the child’s clasping fingers.