"Come in," cried Flushington, faintly; he wished he had been reading anything but the work by M. Zola, which was propped up in front of him. It is your mild man, who frequently has a taste for seeing the less reputable side of life in this second-hand way, and Flushington would toil manfully through the voluminous pages, hunting up every third word in the dictionary; with a sense of injury when, as was often the case, it was not to be found. Still, there was a sort of intellectual orgie about it which had strong fascinations for him, while he knew enough of the language to be aware when the incidents approached the improper, though he was not always able to see quite clearly in what this impropriety consisted.
The door opened, and his heart seemed to stop, and all the blood rushed violently to his head as a large lady came sweeping in, her face rippling with a broad smile of affection.
She horrified Flushington, who knew nobody with the least claim to smile at him so expansively as that; he drank lemonade to conceal his confusion.
"You know me, my dear Fred?" she said, easily. "Of course not—how should you? I'm—for goodness sake, my dear boy, don't look so terribly frightened! I'm your aunt—your aunt Amelia, come over from Australia!"
The shock was a severe one to Flushington, who had not even known he possessed such a relative; he could only say, "Oh?" which he felt even then was scarcely a warm greeting to give an aunt from the Antipodes.
"Oh, but," she added, cheerily, "that's not all; I've another surprise for you: the dear girls would insist on coming up, too, to see their grand college cousin; they're just outside. I'll call them in—shall I?"
In another second Flushington's small room was overrun by a horde of female relatives, while he looked on gasping.
They were pretty girls, too, many of them; but that was all the more dreadful to him: he did not mind the plainer ones half so much; a combination of beauty and intellect reduced him to a condition of absolute imbecility.
He was once caught and introduced to a charming young lady from Newnham, and all he could do was to back feebly into a corner and murmur "Thank you," repeatedly.
He was very little better than that then as his aunt singled out one girl after another. "We won't have any formal nonsense between cousins," she said; "you know them all by name already, I dare say. This is Milly; that's Jane; here's Flora, and Kitty, and Margaret; and that's my little Thomasina over there by the book-case."