“No, dear, not if it amuses you,” said her mother.
But though Louisa did not leave off playing with the reels altogether, she gradually came to find that she preferred other amusements. Her mother taught her several pretty kinds of work, and read aloud stories to her more often than formerly. And, somehow, Louisa never again cared quite as much for her old friends. She thought the Chinese princesses had grown rather “stuck-up” and affected, and she could not get over a strong suspicion that “Clarke’s Number 12” was very ready to be impertinent, if he could ever again get a chance.
Chapter Three.
Good-Night, Winny.
“Say not good-night—but, in some brighter clime,
Bid me good-morning!”
When I was a little girl I was called Meg. I do not mean to say that I have got a different name now that I am big, but my name is used differently. I am now called Margaret, or sometimes Madge, but never Meg. Indeed I do not wish ever to be called Meg, for a reason you will quite understand when you have heard my story. But perhaps I am wrong to call it a “story” at all, so I had better say at the beginning that what I have to tell you is only a sort of remembrance of something that happened to me when I was very little—of some one I loved more dearly, I think, than I can ever love any one again. And I fancy perhaps other little girls will like to hear it.
Well then, to begin again—long ago I used to be called Meg, and the person who first called me so was my sister Winny, who was not quite two years older than I. There were four of us then—four little sisters—Winny, and I, and Dolly, and Blanche, baby Blanche we used to call her. We lived in the country in a pretty house, which we were very fond of, particularly in the summer time, when the flowers were all out. Winny loved flowers more dearly than any one I ever knew, and she taught me to love them too. I never see one now without thinking of her and the things she used to say about them. I can see now, now that I am so much older, that Winny must have been a very clever little girl in some ways, not so much in learning lessons as in thinking things to herself, and understanding feelings and thoughts that children do not generally care about at all. She was very pretty too, I can remember her face so well. She had blue eyes and very long black eyelashes—our mamma used to teaze her sometimes, and say that she had what Irish people call “blue eyes put in with dirty fingers”—and pretty rosy cheeks, and a very white forehead. And her face always had a bright dancing look that I can remember best of all.
We learnt lessons together, and we slept together in two little beds side by side, and we did everything together, from eating our breakfast to dressing our dolls—and when one was away the other seemed only half alive. All our frocks and hats and jackets were exactly the same, and except that Winny was taller than I, we should never have known which was which of our things. I am sure Winny was a very good little girl, but when I try to remember all about her exactly, what seems to come back most to me is her being always so happy. She did not need to think much about being good and not naughty; everything seemed to come rightly to her of itself. She thought the world was a very pretty, nice place; and she loved all her friends, and she loved God most of all for giving them to her. She used to say she was sure Heaven would be a very happy place too, only she did so hope there would be plenty of flowers there, and she was disappointed because mamma said it did not tell in the Bible what kinds of flowers there would be. Almost the only thing which made her unhappy was about there being so many very poor people in the world. She used to talk about it very often and wonder why it was, and when she was very, very little, she cried because nurse would not let her give away her best velvet jacket to a poor little girl she saw on the road.