“This is the room as your mother spent most of her life in when she was like you,” said Mrs. Tozer, when she regained her breath. “It was here as she met your father first. The first time I set my eyes on him, 'That's the man for my Phœbe,' I said to myself; and sure enough, so it turned out.”
“You didn't miss no way of helping it on, neither, granny, if folks do you justice,” said Mrs. Tom. “Mothers can do a deal when they exerts themselves; and now Phœbe has a daughter of her own, I dare be sworn she's just as clever, throwing the nice ones and the well-off ones in her way. It's a wonder to me as she hasn't gone off yet, with all her opportunities—two or three and twenty, ain't you, Miss Phœbe? I should have thought you'd have married long afore now.”
“I stall be twenty my next birthday,” said Phœbe. “My cousins are a great deal younger, I hear; are they at school? I hope I shall see them before I go.”
“Oh, you'll see 'em fast enough,” said their mother, “they're 'aving their music lesson. I don't hold with sending girls to school. I likes to keep them under my own eye. I suppose I needn't ask you now if you play?”
“A very little,” said Phœbe, who rather piqued herself upon her music, and who was learned in Bach and Beethoven, and had an opinion of her own about Wagner. Mrs. Tom brightened visibly, for her girls played not a little, but a great deal.
“And draw?—but I needn't ask, for living in London, you've got masters at your very door.”
“Not at all, I am sorry to say,” said Phœbe, with a pathetic tone of regret in her voice.
“Lord bless us! Now who'd have thought it? I think nothing a sacrifice to give mine the best of education,” said Mrs. Tom.