Louie and her Colonel did not thrive better as the years went on. Money never seemed able to stay with them. Henrietta helped them long after everyone else had become tired of them. She did not expect gratitude, nor did she get it. In spite of her dependence, Louie managed to convey the impression of Henrietta's inferiority, and the children spoke of her as a butt.
"Oh, it's Aunt Etta's year; it really is rather a fag to think we shall have her for three weeks. Ethel, it's your turn to take her in tow; I had her all last time."
"Poor Etta!" said Minna; "she is such an interminable talker, it does worry Arthur so. She means very well; we all know that."
Minna's children were very much of the twentieth century, and were not going to bear with a dull old maid, merely because she was their aunt and had been kind to them. As one of them expressed it, "Never put yourself out for a relation, however distant. That's an axiom."
Little as the younger generation thought of her, she thought something of them, and the second week in December, when she chose her Christmas presents for all her nieces and nephews, was the pleasantest week in the year to her.
Henrietta had been fourteen years abroad, when she came to pay her biennial visit to Evelyn.
"Who do you think has come to live here, Henrietta?" said Evelyn, as they sat talking the first evening. "Ellen."
"Yes, our dear old Ellen--Mrs. Plumtree. She's a widow now. Her eldest son is working here, and she is living with him and his wife. I went to see her last week, and she was so delighted to talk over old times, and when she heard you were coming, she was so excited. You were always her favourite."
A few days afterwards they went, to find Ellen a very hale old lady. In spite of having brought up a large family of her own, she had the clearest remembrance of apparently every incident of the childhood of "you two young ladies" (so she still called them) as though she had never had any other interest in life.
"Oh, and, Miss Etta," she said, "what a sight you did think of Miss Evie! I never knew a child take so to anyone before. 'She's quite a little mother,' I often used to say to Sarah. Do you remember Sarah? She died only last year; she suffered dreadful with her heart. Do you remember how you always would go to put your hand into the water before I gave Miss Evie her bath, because you wanted to be sure it wasn't too hot? Every evening you did it; and one day you were out late, and Miss Evie was in bed before you came in, and you cried because you hadn't been able to do it."