"You know how much Maria thinks of literary people?"
"Yes."
"I don't care for them quite so much as she does. I am more drawn to those who have suffered, whose lives have been shattered like glass as my own life has been, and who gather up the fragments that remain and weave a beautiful embroidery out of them."
Annette knew that her aunt wanted her to say, "As you do yourself."
She considered a moment and then said, "You are thinking of Aunt Catherine."
Aunt Harriet was entirely nonplussed. She felt unable to own that she had no such thought. She sighed deeply, and said after a pause, "I don't want it repeated, Annette,—I learned long ago that it is my first duty to keep my troubles to myself, to consume my own smoke,—but my circulation has never been normal since the day Aunt Cathie died."
Then after a moment she added, with sudden brightness, as one who relumes the torch on which a whole household depends—
"But you have not guessed who our visitor was, and what a droll adventure it all turned out. How I did laugh when it was all over and he was safely out of hearing! Maria said there was nothing to laugh at, but then she never sees the comic side of things as I do."
"I begin to think it must have been Canon Wetherby, the clergyman who told you that story about the parrot who said 'Damn' at prayers, and made Aunt Maria promise not to put it in one of her books."