She orders Mother about as if she were a child. Mother does look very young, as I have said. She ought, and so ought Aunt Gerty, considering the trouble they both take to keep the cloven hoof of age off their faces. They go to bed with poultices of oatmeal on them, and Aunt Gerty once tried the raw-beef plaster. But what she does in the night she undoes in the day, with the grease paint and sticky messes that are part of her profession.
She lives with us except when she is on tour, and is only here when she is “resting” in the Era, and all that time she is dreadfully cross, because she would rather be doing than resting, for “resting” is only a polite way of saying no one has wanted to engage her, and that she is “out of a shop,” which all actresses hate.
CHAPTER III
I HAVE forced George’s hand, so I am told, and neither he nor mother take any notice of me.
But Aunt Gerty hugged me all over when she heard what I had done, and scolded Mother for not being nice to me.
“I don’t see why you need put that poor child in Coventry?” she said. “You had more need to be grateful to her than not. How much longer was it going to go on, I want to know? Hiding away his lawful wife like an old Bluebeard, and me Sister Anne boiling over and wanting to call it all from the house-tops!”
“Well, Gerty, you seem to have got it a bit mixed!” said Mother. “But, talking of Bluebeard, I always envied the first Mrs. B. the lots of cupboard room she must have had! I wonder if she was a hoarder, like me, who never have the heart to throw anything away? If I do happen to see the plans for the new house, I will speak up for lots of cupboards, and that is all I care about.”
“See the plans! Why, of course you will! Isn’t it your right? You must make a point of seeing them and putting your word in. Look after your own comfort in this world or you will jolly well find yourself out in the cold, and ‘specially with a husband like you’ve got!”
“Bother moving!” said Mother, in her dreary way that comes when she has been overdoing it, as she has lately. “It is an odious wrench; just like having all one’s teeth out at once.”
“Hadn’t need! Yours are just beautiful. One of your points, Lucy, and don’t you forget it.”