“Of course we will send her the things, but she is a foolish old lady. As if I should keep deep black-bordered handkerchiefs by me: really it is too absurd.”
“Yes, darling, it is too absurd. Still, send her a nice sunshade, or whatever it is she wants; I suppose a pound or two will do it,” Walter said, and hurried off to the office.
But Florence sat thinking. The sunshade and the handkerchiefs would make a big hole in the money allowed for weekly expenses, could not indeed come out of it. She wished she could take things as easily as Walter did, but the small worries of life never fell upon him as they did upon her. She was inclined to think that it was the small worries that made wrinkles, and she thought of those on poor Aunt Anne’s face. Perhaps that was why women as a rule had so many more lines than men. The lines on a man’s face were generally fewer and deeper, but on a woman’s they were small and everywhere; they symbolized the little cares of every day, the petty anxieties that found men too hard to mark. She went through her accounts: she was one of those women who keep them carefully, who know to a penny how they spent their last five-pound note. But it was only because she was anxious to give Walter the very best that could be got out of his income that she measured so often the length and breadth of her purse. However, it was no good. The old lady must have her sunshade and her handkerchiefs. So Florence walked to Regent Street and back to buy them. She went without the gloves she had promised herself, determined that Catty should wait for a hat, and that she would cut down the dessert for a week at the little evening dinner.
The brown-paper parcel was directed and sent off to Mrs. Baines. With a sigh Florence wished she were more generous, and dismissed the whole business from her mind.
“Mrs. Baines called, ma’am,” the servant said, when she reached home that day. “She wanted the address of a very good dressmaker.”
“Is she here? I hope you begged her to come in?” Florence asked, with a vision of Aunt Anne calling in a hurry, tired by her walk, and distressed at finding no one at home.
“Oh no, ma’am; she didn’t get out of the carriage when she heard you were not in. I gave her Madame Celestine’s address, and said that she had made your best evening dress, as she was very particular about its being a grand dressmaker.”
“I suppose it was for Mrs. North,” Florence thought. “Poor Aunt Anne is not likely to want Madame Celestine.”
Then she imagined the spare old lady in a scanty black gown going out with the pretty and probably beautifully dressed girls to whom she was chaperon.
As a sort of amends for the unkindness of fate, Florence made some little soft white adornments for throat and wrists such as widows wear and that yet look smart, and, packing them in a cardboard box, sent them—With kind love to Aunt Anne. “Perhaps they will gratify her pride a little, poor dear, and it is so nice to have one’s pride gratified,” she thought. And then, for a space, Aunt Anne was almost forgotten.