“I suppose you have scarcely yet made acquaintance with your two aunts who live quite close to the Fallodens in Yorkshire?”
“Oh, quite well!” The strong wrinkled face flashed into laughter. But suddenly the speaker checked herself, and laid a worn hand gently on Constance’s knee—“You won’t mind if I tell you things?—you won’t think me an impertinent old woman? I knew your father”—was there just an imperceptible pause on the words?—“when he was quite a boy; and my people were small squires under the shelter of the Risboroughs before your father sold the property and settled abroad. I was brought up with all your people—your Aunt Marcia, and your Aunt Winifred, and all the rest of them. I saw your mother once in Rome—and loved her, like everybody else. But—as probably you know—your Aunt Winifred—who was keeping house for your father—gathered up her silly skirts, and departed when your father announced his engagement. Then she and your Aunt Marcia settled together in an old prim Georgian house, about five miles from the Fallodens; and there they have been ever since. And now they are tremendously excited about you!”
“About me?” said Constance, astonished. “I don’t know them. They never write to me. They never wrote to father!”
“All the same you will have a letter from them soon. And of course you remember your father’s married sister, Lady Langmoor?”
“No, I never even saw her. But she did sometimes write to father.”
“Yes, she was not quite such a fool as the others. Well, she will certainly descend on you. She’ll want you for some balls—for a drawing-room—and that kind of thing. I warn you!”
“Why should she want me?—when she never wanted me before—or any of us?”
“Ah, that’s her affair! But it is your other aunts who delight me. Your Aunt Marcia, when I first knew her, was in an ascetic phase. People called it miserliness—but it wasn’t; it was only a moral hatred of waste—in anything. We envied her abominably, when I was a girl in my early teens, much bothered with dressing, because she had invented a garment—the only one of any kind that she wore under her dress. She called it a ‘Unipantaloonicoat’—you can imagine why! It included stockings. It was thin in summer and thick in winter. There was only one putting on—pouf!—and then the dress. I thought it a splendid idea, but my mother wouldn’t let me copy it. Your Aunt Winifred had just the opposite mania—of piling on clothes—because she said there were ‘always draughts.’ If one petticoat fastened at the back, there must be another over that which fastened at the front—and another at the side—and so on, _ad infinitum_. But then, alack!—they suddenly dropped all their absurdities, and became quite ordinary people. Aunt Winifred took to religion; she befriends all the clergy for miles round. She is the mother of Mother Church. And Aunt Marcia, after having starved herself of clothes for years and collected nothing more agreeable than snails, now wears silks and satins, and gossips and goes out to tea, and collects blue china like anybody else. I connect it with the advent of a certain General who after all went off solitary to Malta, and died there. Poor Marcia! But you will certainly have to go and stay there.”