Keziah arranged my aunt in an arm-chair and handed over the fydo to her care, and then retired with my pulverised parlourmaid to the servants’ hall.
Aunt Amelia was extremely gracious for her, in an early Victorian fashion, ’Hoped we liked our house and had found suitable domestic help.’ She then asked in the next breath, without waiting for my answers, what we thought of the church, and when I replied that we liked it very much she said,—
’I’m distressed to hear it, Margaret. It may be a beautiful structure, but do you know the vicar believes in the Virgin Mary?’
Ross got up hurriedly and opened another window, and then my amiable relative started on the family and her friends and proceeded to pick their religious views to pieces, while the fydo wheezed and stank and panted at her feet.
I felt at all costs the conversation must be changed, so I told her rather irrelevantly that we kept chickens, but that we couldn’t have many as we hadn’t much space.
’Ah, Margaret,’ she said, ’if you want space you can always look above.’
’But you can’t keep chickens there, Gweat Aunt,’ said the Gidger, who had been listening with great interest to the conversation.
My brother looked at me piteously. I don’t know how much longer he could have controlled his laughter. Mercifully the fydo got fidgety, so the good lady got up to go. The Poppet observed with deep interest that the loose cover of the chair upon which the visitor had been sitting was all pulled out and wrinkled. She looked up at her great-aunt, and in a voice of the most intense interest, said,—
’Look how you’ve wuckled up the cover of muvver’s chair. You must be cowogated like our hen-house roof.’
Ross became so alarmingly faint that he could only gasp out a choked ’good-bye’ and hurry upstairs.
I found him a few minutes later with his head buried in a sofa cushion. ’Oh, what a thing it is to have a corrugated relative!’ he gasped. ’Isn’t she a priceless female? And their clothes! I must write and tell daddy. How he would have enjoyed it.’
And then my brother suddenly turned serious in that funny way he has, and said,—
’But now, wasn’t she absolutely putrid, picking holes in everybody who differs in the least degree from herself. I hate that type of "Christian"; you ought to be able to judge Him by His followers, and half the time you can’t. Nasty, spiteful old cat, bet her husband wished he’d never married her after the first ten minutes. I don’t wonder he kicked the bucket at an early age.’