“Once start Miss Twitter,” nurse used to say, “and you never know when she’ll stop,” and it was much the same with her if she began to cry. It would go on and on till everybody’s patience was worn out, and worst of all when you thought it had really come to an end, some tiny word or look even would begin it all again.
Still, on the whole, Mary cared the most for Twitter of her three little cousins. She was certainly the cleverest, and the most ready to understand what had come to be called “Miss Mary’s fancifulness.”
Perhaps, as I have spoken of the children as her cousins, I had better explain a little about the family in the Square. Mary herself had no brothers or sisters, and no father or mother; “no nobody,” she once said of herself very pitifully when she was very little, and before she came to live with her kind relations, who at that time were not in England. But she had always been very well taken care of by a lady who long ago had been Mary’s own mother’s governess, and now she had several “somebodies,” her uncle and aunt and the three little ones, and best of all, perhaps, Michael, the big brother of sixteen, who had been her first great friend in her new home. He was then a boy of twelve and Mary was eight, and boys of twelve sometimes look down on little girls who are four or five years younger than they are. Not so with Michael, he was so good and kind. He tried to make the shy little cousin, with her curly red hair and soft brown eyes, feel “at home” and happy, by every means in his power, and Mary had never forgotten this, and often said to herself that she never, never would (and I don’t think she ever will).
Nurse looked at Mary rather curiously as she handed her her tea-cup.
“Was there any one in the room with you, Miss Mary, my dear, when I went upstairs to fetch you?”
“No,” said Mary, but her own tone was perhaps not quite as usual, for she was thinking to herself if the “no” was quite truthful. Yes it was, she decided, the Cooies were not in the room, and besides, nurse meant any person—wood-pigeons were not people. So “No,” she repeated, more positively, “why do you ask, nurse?”
“Oh,” said nurse, “I may have been mistaken, but I thought I heard you speaking as I opened the door.”
“I daresay I was,” said Mary.
Nurse said something indistinct—a sort of “humph.”
“It is not a very good habit to get into—that speaking to yourself,” she said. “It makes one seem silly-like.”