“Well, he’s a queer kind of a doctor. I shall have to consult some one else.”
Mrs. Leavitt rose with a startled cry. Glancing up from the endless pattern, at an easy stage now, the dust-searching eye had discovered much small prey. She gathered up her work carefully and bustled about the room.
“If that dreadful Barker didn’t forget to straighten out this room while we were at dinner. Dr. Latham and Mrs. Hilary will think I am the most careless housekeeper. I do hope, Helen, that you explain to our friends how the war has taken all our servants. You should tell everybody that before it began Barker was only a tweeny, and now she is all we have in the shape of a butler and parlor-maid and three-quarters of our staff. And she is so careless and clumsy.” She went from cushion to vase, from fireplace to table, straightening out the room somewhat to her satisfaction: the father and the daughter watching her with resigned amusement.
A book lay open, face down on the writing-table. She pounced on the volume. Bransby’s amusement vanished. “Careful there, Caroline, I am reading that book.”
“Not now, you’re not—and books belong in book-cases.” She closed it with a snap.
“Well, the book’s in its proper place,” she said, thrusting it into its shelf. “There, that’s better. Now I wonder how the drawing-room is. I must see. Dear me, this war has been a great inconvenience,” she sighed as she went from the room—taking Hugh, none too willing, with her.
Caroline Leavitt was not an unpatriotic woman. Simply, to her home and house were country and universe too—her horizon enclosed nothing beyond them. She loved England, because her home and her housekeeping, this house and her vocation, were in it; and not her home, as some do, because it was in England. England was a frame, a background. Her emotions began at Deep Dale’s front door, and ended in its kitchen garden. There are many such women in the world.
“Your aunt is a martinet, Helen,” Bransby grumbled smilingly. “She never lets me have my books about as I like them—and she is always losing my place.”
“Do you know,” her father continued, “I have found rare good sport in my books? Some of those chaps there—and Dickens especially—now—he _was_ a card. Did you ever read ‘David Copperfield,’ Helen?”