"What can the unintelligible child mean by that?" said she. "Because you are unintelligible, you know you are, Lizarann!"
"Yass, please!" said Lizarann. And then she felt when people laughed that she was being treated like a child, which at her age was absurd.
Miss Caldecott, the sister-in-law, was one of those tiresome people who are always forming grown-up Leagues against children, and making it distinctly understood that these leagues, though ready to stoop to the level of children's understanding, do so under protest, and with reservations as to their own superiority. Miss Caldecott paraded hers, greatly to Lizarann's umbrage, in the tone in which she said, "We do not yet know, my dear, that Mr. Challis has an aunt"; into which tone she contrived to infuse a suggestion of respect for Challis's family, even if the previous generations consisted only of the direct line.
Challis refused to be taken into the League. To avoid it he stated that he had more aunts than was really the case. He went further, and ascribed to one of them attributes that have surely never belonged to any person's aunt. She had, he said, a front, and lived on tea-leaves, which came out on her person as a kind of stiff black net which he had the impudence to say he believed was never removed at night.
Lizarann recalled a like experience which she thought would bear repetition.
"Bridgetticks," she said, in a loud, outspoken way that commanded an audience, "she's a hunkle comes out a Sundays and Schristmas Day, and gold trimmings to his coat, and brarse buttons, and Bridgetticks, she could count up eight and two behind."
"You must try to say 'uncle,' my dear, not 'hunkle,'" said Miss Caldecott, which Lizarann did, meekly, with an impression that perhaps she had claimed too much for Old Shakey, which was the old man's bye-name in Tallack Street, where he appeared at intervals. She had used the "h" to give an adventitious force of character to the tremulous relic of better days she was referring to. She wished him to be thought of as resolute, without presenting him in the aspect of a swashbuckler.
"What do you make of him, Rector?" asked Challis.
"I know all about him. At least, Gus knows." Athelstan Taylor had appropriated a camp stool, that he might accommodate Lizarann and his younger daughter on his knees. He looked round at his sister-in-law. "Don't you remember, my dear? Gus told us about him. A sort of old pensioner chap!"
Miss Caldecott remembered him, primly. "Not very sober, I fear!" said she.