As for Dora and May they were long of ceasing to talk with bated breath and the height of loving enthusiasm of how Annie had mastered herself, and what a stay she had been in the hour of need to the lad. They planned and carried out their plans at every spare moment, in the manufacture of knitted socks and cravats for his benefit. But their great achievement was a quilted dressing-gown which Dora contrived to cut out, and May, in spite of her bad sewing, to help to sew together, that in his convalescence he might sit up in bed like a little sick prince.
CHAPTER XI.
MRS. JENNINGS AND HER DAUGHTER HESTER.
Rose Millar had made up her mind to like everything, if possible, in her new surroundings, and when she came up to town it was not only by a piece of good fortune, it was to the girl's credit, that she found so much she could appreciate, and so little, comparatively, that it was difficult to put up with.
In the first place, and as of primary consequence to Rose's well-being, Mrs. Jennings, the lady with whom Rose was boarded, turned out an excellently-disposed gentlewoman. She had a well-ordered house, pervaded with the spirit of a gentlewoman. The whole establishment was full of the self-respect which showed itself in a scrupulous consideration for the rights and claims, the doings and feelings, of others.
Rose did not complain because Mrs. Jennings and her house alike were also antiquated and formal. But the lady was not merely formal; it was a point of honour and an inveterate weakness with her to refuse to own that she had anything to do with such small but welcome boons to her as boarders. There she sat, serenely disclaiming the slightest knowledge of what had taken place, and attributing every attention to her old servant Susan, who had been with Mrs. Jennings since her marriage five-and-thirty years before. Or, if it was not Susan, it was her coadjutor, Marianne, in her housemaid's neat dress, whom Susan, in her working housekeeper's black cap and gold-rimmed spectacles, had trained to all fit and proper service in a gentlewoman's house.
In person Mrs. Jennings was tall and thin, sallow, and slightly hook-nosed, but still handsome. Her upright, broad-shouldered, and, by comparison, slender waisted figure was conventionally good; but it was hard to say how far it was her own, or how much it was made up. For she was one of those women who consider that it is a duty which they owe to the world not only to show themselves to the best advantage in bodily presence to the last, but so to conceal and atone for the ravages of time as to preserve a semblance of their maturity after it is long past. The performance is not altogether successful. For one thing, it is apt to call forth a spirit of contemptuous pity in the youthful spectator who is still a long way from needing to employ such laborious, self-denying arts.
Mrs. Jennings added to her natural air of dignity by a filmy shawl of black lace in summer, and of white Shetland wool in winter, draped round her without so much as a fold out of order, and by a somewhat elaborate modification of a widow's cap which added half an inch to her height. As Rose wrote in an early letter home, Mrs. Jennings's cap looked as if she had been born with it on her coal black hair, or as if it were glued and gummed there beyond any possibility of being displaced. Mother ought to see it, take an example, and abandon her flighty, waggling head-gear. No, on second thoughts, Rose would not like to see mother with a cap fitted on her head like the bowl of a helmet, and giving the idea of such stony stability that it might have been fastened with invisible nails hammered into her skull.