“The life here suited me well enough; I had got used to it, I suppose.”
“You can get used to something bad, can’t you, but that’s no reason you are not to welcome a change? Oh, you’ll like the new life that’s to be spent up-stairs in the daylight, above-board like, instead of this kind of ‘behind the scenes’ you have been doing for eighteen years. And a pretty woman still, for so you are. Cheer up! You are going to get new scenery, new dresses, new backcloth——”
“You see everything through the stage, Gerty. I must say it irritates one sometimes, especially now, when——”
“I know what you mean. No offence, my dear old sis. And you can depend on me not to be bringing the smell of the footlights, as they call it—it’s the only truly pleasant smell there is, to my idea!—into your fine new house. Pity but He can’t get a little whiff of it into his comedies, and some manager would see his way to putting them on, perhaps? No, beloved, me and George don’t cotton to each other, nor never shall. He isn’t my sort. I like a man that is a man, not a society baa-lamb! Baa! I’ve no patience with such——”
“Sh’, Gerty. You seem to forget his child sitting messing away with her paints in a corner so quietly there!”
That was me. Aunt Gerty stopped a minute, and then they went on just the same.
“We have never minded the child yet” (which was true), “and I don’t see why we should begin now. Tempe is getting quite a woman and able to hold her tongue when needful. And she knows her way about her precious father well enough. What you’ve to think of now, Lucy, is getting your hands white, and the marks of sewing and cooking off. Lemons and pumice! Cream’s good, too. You have been George Taylor’s upper servant too long—Gracious, who’s that at the front-door?”
Aunt Gerty nearly knocked me over in her rush to the window. We were all three sitting in the front bedroom, which is George’s, when he is at home, and Mother had been washing my hair. It was a dreadfully hot day—a dog-day, only we haven’t any dogs, but the kittens were tastefully arranged in the spare wash-basin all round the jug for coolness. They had put themselves there. We humans had got very little clothes on, partly for heat and also having got out of the habit of dressing in the afternoons, for no callers ever came to The Magnolias. But there were some now. There was a big, two-horsed thing at the door such as I have often seen driving out to Hampton Court, but never, never had I seen one stop at our gate before. It was most exciting. I hoped Jessie Hitchings and her mother saw.
There were two ladies inside, one of them old and frumpy, the other was Lady Scilly, whom I knew, though Mother didn’t. I haven’t got to her yet in my story. A footman was taking their orders, and Sarah was standing at the door holding on to her cap that she’d forgotten to put a pin in. Lucky she had a cap on at all! Mother doesn’t like her to leave her caps off to go to the door, even when George isn’t here, out of principle, and for once it told.
“For goodness sake get your head in, Gerty, you have got the shade a bit too strong to-day,” cried Mother, pulling my aunt in by her petticoats, and nearly upsetting the mirror on the dressing-table. Aunt Gerty came in with a cross grunt, and we all sat well inside till we heard the carriage drive away and Sarah mounting the stairs all of a hop, skip and a jump.