For a moment the air was filled with exclamations and ejaculations. After that, explanations were in order.
If you have read The Thirteenth Ring, you will remember well enough that Aunt Bobby was a ship’s cook who had cooked her way up and down one of the Great Lakes a thousand times or more, and that on one memorable journey she had acted as a fairy godmother to one of Florence’s pals. Florence had never forgotten her, though their journeys had carried them to different ports.
“But, Aunt Bobby,” she exclaimed at last, “what can you be doing here? And how did such a strange home as this come into being?”
“It’s all on account of her.” Aunt Bobby nodded toward a slim girl who, garbed in blue overalls, sat beside the box-like stove. “She’s my grandchild. Grew up on the ship, she did, amongst sailors. Tie a knot and cast off a line with the best of them, she can, and skin up a mast better than most.
“But the captain would have it she must have book learnin’. So here we are, all high and dry on land. And her a-goin’ off to school every mornin’. But when school is over, you should see her—into every sort of thing.
“Ah, yes,” she sighed, “she’s a problem, is Meg!”
Meg, who might have been nearing sixteen, smiled, crossed her legs like a man, and then put on a perfect imitation of a sailor contemptuously smoking a cob pipe—only there was no pipe.
“This place, do you ask?” Aunt Bobby went on. “Meg calls it the cathedral, she does, on account of the pillars.
“Them pillars was lamp-posts once, broken lamp-posts from the boulevard. Dumped out here, they was. The captain and his men put up the cathedral for us, where we could look at the water when we liked. Part of it is from an old ship that sank in the river and was raised up, and part, like the pillars, comes from the rubbish heap.
“I do say, though, they made a neat job of it. Meg’ll show you her stateroom after a bit.