“Why! was there no Macintosh in your time?” exclaimed Bud. “I thought she went away back to the—to the Roman period. She’s the funniest old lady in the land, and comes twice a-week to teach us dancing and deportment. She’s taught them to mostly all the nobility and gentry of Scotland; she taught Lady Anne and all her brothers when they were in St Andrews.”
“I never heard of her,” said Ailie; “she must be—be—be decidedly quaint.”
“She’s so quaint you’d think she’d be kept in a corner cupboard with a bag of camphor at the back to scare the moths away. She’s a little wee mite, not any bigger than me—than I,—and they say she’s seventy years old, but sometimes she doesn’t look a day more than forty-five if it weren’t for her cap and her two front teeth missing. She’s got the loveliest fluffy silver hair—pure white, like Mrs Molyneux’s Aunt Tabitha’s Persian cat; cheeks like an apple, hands as young as yours, and when she walks across a room she glides like this, so you’d think she was a cutter yacht—”
Bud sailed across the parlour to represent the movement of The Macintosh with an action that made her aunties laugh, and the dog gave one short yelp of disapproval.
“That was the way that Grandma Buntain walked,—it used to be considered most genteel,” said Bell. “They trained girls up to do it with a back-board and a book on the top of the head; but it was out before my time; we just walked anyway in Barbara Mushet’s Seminary, where the main things were tambouring and the Catechism.”
“Miss Macintosh is a real lady,” Bud went on. “She’s got genuine old ancestors. They owned a Highland place called Kaims, and the lawyers have almost lawyered it a’ awa’ she says, so now she’s simply got to help make a living teaching dancing and deportment. I declare I don’t know what deportment is no more than the child unborn, unless it’s shutting the door behind you, walking into a room as if your head and your legs were your own, keeping your shoulders back, and being polite and kind to everybody, and I thought folks ’d do all that without attending classes, unless they were looney. Miss Macintosh says they are the sine qua non and principal branches for a well-bred young lady in these low days of clingy frocks and socialism; but the Principal she just smiles and gives us another big block of English history. Miss Macintosh doesn’t let on, but I know she simply can’t stand English history, for she tells us, spells between quadrilles, that there hasn’t been any history anywhere since the Union of the Parliaments, except the Rebellion of 1745. But she doesn’t call it a rebellion. She calls it ‘yon affair.’ She’s Scotch! I tell you, Auntie Bell, you’d love to meet her! I sit, and sit, and look at her like—like a cat. She wears spectacles, just a little clouded, only she doesn’t call them spectacles; she says they are preserves, and that her eyes are as good as anybody’s. They’re bright enough, I tell you, for over seventy.”
“Indeed I would like to see the creature!” exclaimed Miss Bell. “She must be an original! I’m sometimes just a trifle tired of the same old folk about me here,—I know them all so well, and all they’re like to do or say, that there’s nothing new or startling to be expected from them.”
“Would you like to see her?” said Bud quickly; “then—then, some day I’ll tell her, and I’ll bet she’ll come. She dresses queer—like a lady in the ‘School for Scandal,’ and wears long mittens like Miss Minto, and when our music-master, Herr Laurent, is round she makes goo-goo eyes at him fit to crack her glasses. ‘Oh, Hair-r-r!’ she says, sitting with her mitts in her lap,—‘oh, Hair-r-r! can you no’ give the young ladies wise-like Scotch sangs, instead o’ that dreich Concone?’ And sometimes she’ll hit him with a fan. He says she plays the piano to our dancing the same as it was a spinet.”
“I declare it beats all!” said Miss Bell. “Does the decent old body speak Scotch?”
“Sometimes. When she’s making goo-goo eyes at the Herr, or angry, or finding fault with us but doesn’t want to hurt our feelings.”