"Did you know Mr. Dale's aunt was dying?" Mrs. Payton said.
Mrs. Holmes frowned. She was, as she often said, a very busy woman; she kept house, made calls, had "fittings," shopped, and read the newspapers. She did these things well and thoroughly, for, as her granddaughter had once said, she "was no fool." She was shrewd, capable, energetic, and entirely a woman of the world. Her daughter's social seclusion and mental apathy amazed and irritated her. But intelligent and busy as she was, she had leisure for one thing: Fear. She never said of what. Nor would she, if she could help it, allow the name of her Fear to be mentioned. "I always run away if people talk of unpleasant things!" she used to say, sharply. The mere reference to Mr. Dale's aunt made her pull her stole about her shoulders, and clutch for bags and card-cases that were always sliding off a steep and slippery lap.
"Why, Mama, you mustn't go," Mrs. Payton remonstrated, "you've just—"
"I only stopped a minute to say that if you don't keep Freddy in order, she will disgrace us all," Mrs. Holmes said, nervously; "but you keep talking about unpleasant things! I am all heart, and I can't bear to hear about other people's troubles."
Mrs. Payton understood; she gave her mother a pitiful look. ("I believe she'd like to live to be a hundred!" she thought; "whereas, if it wasn't for poor Mortimore I'd be glad to go; I'm so—tired. And Freddy wouldn't miss me.") All the while she was talking in her kind voice, of living, not dying; of her intention of starting in early this year on her Christmas presents—"I get perfectly worn out with them each Christmas!" Of her cook's impertinence—"servants are really impossible!" Of Flora's low-spiritedness—"Miss Carter says she's simply wild to get married, but I can't think so; Flora is so refined."
"Human nature isn't very refined," Mrs. Holmes said.
"Miss Carter says she wants to take music lessons."
"That's terribly refined," Mrs. Holmes said, satirically.
"It's absurd," her daughter declared, with annoyance; "music lessons! Rather different from the time I went to housekeeping—then, servants worked! I gave Flora a lovely embroidered collar the other day; and yet, the next thing I knew, Anne told me she was crying her eyes out down in the coal-cellar. I went right down to the cellar, and said, 'You must tell me what's the matter.' But all I could get out of her was that she was tired of living. Miss Carter says Anne says that Flora's young man has married somebody else, and she—"
"Don't mumble! It's almost impossible to hear you," her mother broke in; "as for servants, there are no such things nowadays. They have men callers, a thing my mother never tolerated! And they don't dream of being in at ten. My seventh cook in five months comes to-morrow."