“Bless the child!” cried Miss Carrington with a laugh. “Does he imagine himself at twenty-four wiser than a worldly old woman of sixty-eight? You mean that I can’t realize your bugaboo situation because I didn’t marry. But I was to marry once! Another woman stole my husband. There was excuse for her according to you, for I was going to marry him for ambition, and she loved him madly. I remained their friend, and I saw my vengeance. They were wretchedly unhappy, while I, with my ambition answering to his, would have crowned him.”
Miss Carrington arose and drew herself up to her full height, which was equal to Kit’s. Her narrow slipper of black silk, simply bound, without an ornament, dropped off as she arose. Kit sprang to put it on for her. She leaned on his shoulder and watched him fit the slipper on her foot. She was inordinately proud of her long, narrow feet, and never adorned their apparel.
“You see, my boy, I practise what I preach; I have ample space to stand in. Learn from the parable of the loose slipper and do not cramp your foundations.” She leaned forward to smile into Kit’s face, almost coquettishly.
“My fine lad,” she resumed, “gratify your aunt, who is almost your mother, and make your life what marriage with Helen Abercrombie will let you make it. Trust me, Kit, as a wise woman who knows her world. It will never do to face it wearing rose-coloured glasses. ‛Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,’ and it is my experience that you need not bother about the other part of your rendering. God is sure to take the things that are God’s Himself; you need not render them. They are vital things, too, my dear; your strength, your health, your youth, at last your life. Make sure of all that you can get; it is not too much.”
Kit stood with hanging head, her arm over his shoulders. He was distressed. Never had his aunt betrayed herself to him as now, and the vision of her destitution shocked his manhood, his ideals, his conscience. To have lived almost to her three score and ten, to be so clever, so strong, yet to have garnered no wheat, but only bright pebbles!
“Well, Kit,” Miss Carrington said, altering her tone and withdrawing her arm as she turned to leave him, “I’ll not ask for your answer now; in fact, I don’t want you to answer yet. But I beg you to remember that I implore you to marry Helen Abercrombie, and to marry soon. You are precisely the sort of boy who falls in love and makes a hopeless mess of his life from the loftiest plane of boundless idiocy. You were always quixotically lovable. I’m ready to admit that it is most charming in a boy, my dear, but it is fatal to a man. So listen to your doting aunt, and on your life do not disobey her! What are you going to do while I take my siesta?”
Kit felt, as his aunt meant him to feel it, the veiled threat in her warning, but he answered her question:
“I told young Peter Berkley that I’d give him my collection of postage stamps if he’d come around. I’m looking for him any minute.”
“That is nice little Mrs. Peter Berkley’s boy? The brother of my extraordinary namesake, little Anne? She is Methuselette on one side and an innocent baby on the other. I could greatly enjoy cultivating little Anne Berkley’s acquaintance,” said Miss Carrington. “I complained of difficulty in threading a needle the other day—it was the sewing afternoon at the hospital, an occasion which I grace, but hardly serve—and Mrs. Berkley had brought Anne to thread needles for us. That small elf changeling urged me to make a pilgrimage to Beaupré to get my sight restored, because, forsooth, my name being ‛Anne’ the good Saint Anne would be likely to help me! The mother is a remarkably nice, genuine person; pity she’s so devote!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” murmured Kit. “It seems to suit the Berkleys.”