“Will you have tea now, sir?”
“The children are not in, are they, Brownie?”
“Not yet,” Mrs. Brown answered, smoothing her spotless apron. “Mr. Jim said they’d be back at four-ish; but when it comes to gettin’ back it’s generally—as a rule more ‘ish’ than ‘four.’ Would you rather wait a little, sir?”
“I think so,” said the squatter, absent-mindedly, his glance wandering back to the letter in his hand. “Yes—there’s no hurry, Brownie—and Miss Norah seems to like to pour out my tea.”
“She do, bless her,” said Mrs. Brown. “I always say meals aren’t the same to Miss Norah if you’re not there, sir. Poor lamb—and so soon goin’ back to that there school. Mighty little she gets for tea there, I’ll be bound.”
“Well, she doesn’t strike one as ill-fed, Brownie—and you know she likes school.”
“I know she likes home better,” said Brownie, darkly. “Me, I don’t hold with schools. I was glad when Master Jim came home for good an’ I’ll be gladder when it’s Miss Norah’s last term. Edication’s all very well in its way, like castor-oil; but you can get too much of it. Why, Miss Norah’s grandma never even heard of half them fancy things she knows, and where’d you find a better manager of a house than she was? What she didn’t know about curing bacon——!” Brownie sighed in inability to express fitly the superhuman attainments of her nursling’s ancestress.
“Well, you know, Brownie, I look to you for all that side of Norah’s education,” said Mr. Linton pacifically. “And you say yourself that the child is no bad housekeeper.”
“I should think she isn’t,” retorted Mrs. Brown. “Mighty few girls, though I say it as shouldn’t, cook better than Miss Norah, or can be handier about a house. But where’s the use of all them other things? Physics, which ain’t anything to do with medicine, an’ brushwork that’s not even first-cousin to a broom an’ physi—something—or—other, which is learnin’ more about your inside than any young lady has any call for. No, I don’t hold with it at all. But it doesn’t seem to hurt her, bless her!”
“No, I don’t think it hurts her,” David Linton said. “Learning does not seem to make her any less healthy, either in mind or body; and that’s the main thing, Brownie. You mustn’t grumble at the bit of extra polish—they all have it nowadays, and it’s no bad thing.” His eyes lit up suddenly. “There they come,” he said. “Is your kettle boiling?”