Dear Aunt—My good mistress has had an invitation to a place—they call it by the name of Cranley Hurst: that is, the invitation did not come from her cousin, but from her cousin’s brother’s wife, who was gone to keep house for her cousin during what she called “her LITTLE ELECTION.” My mistress said she had never been at “Cranley Hurst” since she was a girl, and she had heard that her cousin, the Hon. Francis Cranley (who, for some cause or another, had shut himself up, when a fine young gentleman, all as one as a hermit) had been routed like a hare out of its form, by his little sister-in-law, who pounced down upon him, now and again, like a hawk, scaring and tearing and domineering wherever she went. My poor mistress was a long time what they call temporizing whether she would go or not, when—I am sure it was to her surprise—she got a letter from the Honorable Francis himself. “He says,” says she, “that it’s the first invitation he has given to any living creature to pass the threshold of Cranley Hurst for five-and-twenty years, and he hopes I will give his sister-in-law, Mrs. James Cranley, the pleasure to receive me, and that he himself would be happy to see me in the old place once more.”
“Poor fellow!” sighed my mistress.
Aunt dear, could you tell me why my mistress sighed “poor fellow,” folded up the letter, and laid a rose I had just brought her from Covent-Garden upon it?—where, darling aunt (only think how it raised my spirits) I saw as good as thirty Irishwomen sitting on what we would call pratee baskets, shelling peas for the quality, and working away at the real Munster Irish, as if they had never left the quays of Cork. She put the rose on the letter, as if, in her thoughts, one had something to do with the other, and, resting her elbow on the table, shaded her face with her hand: after a time, a very long time, I came back into the room, and she was sitting the same way.
“Wouldn’t you like a turn in the park, ma’am,” I said; “for a wonder it’s neither an east wind nor a pour of rain?” So she gazed up in my face, with that kind of mazed look which people have when you talk to them, and their thoughts are in deep sea or land graves—or, may-be, in the Eternity, to which they go before the spirit’s time. And what do you think she said?—why “poor fellow!” again. To be sure, thoughts are thoughts, and we had as good, may-be, forget the thought of many a thought we do think. That same evening she stood opposite the glass—
“Ellen,” she says, “I look very old.”
“There’s a power of amiability in your face, ma’am,” I answers, “and you’ve a fine head-piece.” It’s true for me, and I thought I had got over the age beautifully; but I had not; she turned to look at it again:
“I look very old, Ellen.”
“God bless you! ma’am, age is a beauty to many.”
“Not to me.”
“There’s twenty opinions about the one thing.”