I am right in saying we are all tolerable. The annoying thing is that the new cook, who knows what she is talking about, says that children “go in and out so,” and even Aunt Gerty says that “fancy children never last,” and after all this, I feel that the pretty ones can never count on keeping up to their own standard.
I cannot tell you if our looks come from our father, or our mother? George is small, with a very brown skin. He says he descends “from the little dark, persistent races” that come down from the mountains and take the other savages’ sheep and cows. He has good eyes. They dance and flash. His hair is black, brushed back from his forehead like a Frenchman, and very nice white teeth. He has a mouth like a Jesuit, I have heard Aunt Gerty say. He never sits very still. He is about thirty-seven, but he does not like us chattering about his age.
Mother looks awfully young for hers—thirty-six; and she would look prettier if she didn’t burn her eyes out over the fire making dishes for George, and prick her fingers darning his socks till he doesn’t find out they are darned, or else he wouldn’t wear them again, and spoil her figure stooping, sewing and ironing. George won’t have a sewing machine in the house. Her head is a very good shape, and she does her hair plain over the top to show it. George made her. Sometimes when he isn’t there, she does it as she used before she was married, all waved and floating, more like Aunt Gerty, who is an actress, and dresses her head sunning over with curls like Maud. George has never caught Mother like that, or he would be very angry. He considers that she has the bump of domesticity highly developed (though even when her hair is done plain I never can see it?), and that is why she enjoys being wife, mother, and upper housemaid all in one.
We only keep two out here at Isleworth, though my brother Ben is very useful as handy boy about the place, blacking our boots and browning George’s, and cleaning the windows and stopping them from rattling at nights—a thing that George can’t stand when he is here. When he isn’t we just let them rave, and it is a perfect concert, for this is a very old Georgian house. Mother makes everything, sheets, window-curtains, and our frocks and her own. She makes them all by the same pattern, quite straight like sacks. George likes to see us dressed simply, and of course it saves dressmakers’ bills, or board of women working in the house, who simply eat you out of it in no time. We did have one once to try, and when she wasn’t lapping up cocoa to keep the cold out, she was sucking her thimble to fill up the vacuum. We are dressed strictly utilitarian, and wear our hair short like Ben, and when it gets long mother puts a pudding basin on our heads and snips away all that shows. At last Ariadne cried herself into leave to let hers grow.
The new cook says that if we weren’t dressed so queer, Ariadne and me, we should make some nice friends, but that is just what George doesn’t want. He likes us to be self-contained, and says that there is no one about here that he would care to have us associate with. Our doorstep will never wear down with people coming in, for except Aunt Gerty, and Mr. Aix, the oldest friend of the family, not a soul ever crosses the threshold!
I am forgetting the house-agent’s little girl, round the corner into Corinth Road. She comes here to tea with us sometimes. She is exactly between Ariadne and me in age, so we share her as a friend equally. We got to know her through our cat Robert the Devil choosing to go and stay in Corinth Road once. At the end of a week her people had the bright thought of looking at the name and address on his collar, and sent him back by Jessie, who then made friends with us. George said, when he was told of it, that the Hitchings are so much lower in the social scale than we are, that it perhaps does not matter our seeing a little of each other. She is better dressed than us, in spite of her low social scale. She has got a real osprey in her hat, and a mink stole to wear to church, that is so long it keeps getting its ends in the mud. She doesn’t like our George, though we like hers. George came out of his study once and passed through the dining-room, where Jessie was having tea with us.
“Isn’t he a cure?” said she, with her mouth full of his bread-and-butter.
We told her that our George was no more of a cure than hers, which shut her up; and was quite safe, as neither Ariadne nor I know what a “cure” is. She isn’t really a bad sort of girl. We teach her poetry, and mythology, and she teaches us dancing and religion. She has a governess all to herself every morning, and goes to church regularly. She once said that her mamma called us poor, neglected children, and pitied us. We hit her for her mother, and there was an end of that. We love each other dearly now, and have promised to be bridesmaids to each other, and godmothers to each other’s children. I am going to have ten.
Ariadne went to her birthday party at Christmas, and did a very silly thing, that Mother advised her not to tell George about. Every one at home agreed that poor Ariadne had been dreadfully rude, but I can’t see it? I adore sincerity. When Mr. Hitchings asked her what she would like out of the bran-pie when it was opened, same as they asked all the other children, Ariadne only said quite modestly, “A new papa, please!”
Their faces frightened her so, that she tried to improve it away, and explain she meant that she should like an every-day papa, like Mr. Hitchings, not only a Sunday one, like George. I know of course what she meant, a papa that one sees only from Saturdays to Mondays, and not always then, is only half a papa.