"Obstinacy must be dealt with firmly," she said. "You will be at a loss next Saturday over the apple pudding."
Came a knock at the door, and Margery stood beside the tinted reproduction of the Good Shepherd near it, looking at Mary over the stand crammed with photos of dear departed pupils who, with Youth's heartlessness, had supplied her, since, with no other memories of their passing.
"I've decided to c-conquer the p-pudding," announced Margery. And felt almost rewarded by the spiritual ecstasy of affection in Mary's little eyes.
* * * * * *
Cyprian did not recognize the sisters for the last of a long line of sanctified Englishwomen who, in the past, have run Happy Home-Schools for the daughters of unmodern mothers, many of whom lived abroad and who cherished the suspicion that dear Daphne or Nora would not be prevented from over-working to the detriment of her health at a modern establishment which dealt in Oxford examiners rather than in embroidery classes.
It was Ferlie who grew critical of the Miss Maynes's curriculum, with the conclusion of her fourteenth birthday, and so of their blatant efforts to coerce in the straight and narrow way.
To Cyprian, the sisterless bookworm, the ladies recalled his deceased aunts, a couple who belonged, by rights, to a Victorian novel and at whose separate funerals a special hearse had to be requisitioned for the wreaths.
And all the flowers were symbolically white.
Ferlie, the out-reaching experimentalist, wondered whether such of Cyprian's aunts as remained above ground were exactly the type of people to direct the electrical currents in a houseful of twentieth century youth.
"Mary could have whistled for my brave and better nature," she told Cyprian this afternoon, in relating the incident of the pudding, with a resentment he considered entirely out of proportion to the fact that she had not minded the suet herself. He admitted that, as a sane man, he never ate things which he did not like, nor did he know anybody who, having attained years of discretion, believed such a course necessary to salvation.