“Mrs. McDermott will give you no more orders, Gibson, after to-day. You can go back to your work with an easy mind.”
Jane waited till next morning, and then having ascertained that her aunt had again given orders to the cook respecting dinner, she walked straight into the breakfast-room where she knew that she should find Mrs. McDermott alone, and busy with her correspondence—for she was a great letter writer at that hour of the morning.
“What a noisy girl you are,” she said crossly, as her niece drew up a chair and sat down beside her. “I was just writing a few lines to dear Lady Clark when you came in in your usual brusque way and put all my ideas to flight.”
“They must be poor, timid, little ideas, aunt, to be so easily frightened away,” said Jane.
“Jane, there has been a flippant tone about you for the last day or two that I don’t at all approve of. Flippancy in young people is easily acquired, but difficult to get rid of. The sooner you get rid of yours the better I shall be pleased.”
Jane rose from her chair and swept Mrs. McDermott a stately curtsey. “Is it not almost time, aunt,” she said quietly, “that you gave up treating me, and talking to me, as if I were a child?”
“If you are no longer a child in years, you are still very childish in many of your ways.”
“You are quite epigrammatic this morning, aunt.”
“Don’t be impertinent, young lady.”
“I have no intention of being impertinent. But I have come to see you about the order for dinner which you gave the cook half an hour ago.”