Then Florence interposed: “Why doesn’t she go to Uncle Evarts? He has a large house and servants to wait on her.”
“That, your Aunt Caroline says, is quite out of the question. It seems that the married daughter has come home to spend the winter, and has three little children. Your uncle says it would be very bad for his sister to be shut into a furnace-heated house all winter in the centre of a great city, ‘with three lively children who would fit her for the lunatic asylum before the winter was half over.’”
Mrs. Forman had taken up her letter again and was quoting from it. A silence that suggested consternation fell upon them, broken presently by Jean.
“Mother, will we have to do it?”
“Do what, Jean?”
“Why—have her come here?”
Mrs. Forman’s expressive eyes rested full upon her youngest daughter, with a shade of rebuke in them.
“Isn’t that a strange way to speak of having a visit from your aunt?”
“Well, but—” Jean hesitated, her face flushing under the rebuke, then she hurried on: “Mother, it isn’t just an ordinary visit; you said for all winter, didn’t you? That is what it means, anyway; and she is only a half aunt; it isn’t as though she were father’s own sister; he doesn’t even know her very well; it seems as though he had enough—”
She left her sentence unfinished, but the mother answered what she had meant to say.