“No, no, dear grandmother,” I cried struggling with the hook of that terrible dress, that held me as if it were made of steel, “not tightened. Don’t say tightened! I am suffocating!”
Aunt Lorena came to my rescue and between us we got that band undone and I was able to draw a long breath.
“In my day,” said my little grandmother, “girls were more delicate than they are now. I grieve, Lorena, to discover that Azalea’s foot is far too substantial for these slippers.”
She looked regretfully at some yellowed satin slippers with tarnished sequins on them. Aunt Lorena and I looked down at my good sizable feet—they have done a powerful lot of mountain climbing, as you know—and we both laughed.
“Come,” said Aunt Lorena, “we must forget dressmaking for the day and go for a drive. You too, mother. Won’t you come in the motor just this once?”
“You know very well that I will not, Lorena. My pony cart will do for me. Have young James walk at the pony’s head to-day, please. Old James ruined my last drive by the way he groaned with the rheumatism.”
So all the finery was carted off to a big empty room where, as Aunt Lorena explained to grandmother, we would be able to look it over better, and I was told to dress warmly, and so got into the nice thick coat Mother McBirney had made for me, and put on my mole-skin cap, and my veil and gloves—for Aunt Lorena is terribly fussy about having people well wrapped when they go motoring—and uncle and auntie and I went off.
We were gone for an hour or two and saw many beautiful old estates, but none that I liked better than our own.
“Mother is being drawn about the garden in the pony cart,” Aunt Lorena told me. “It is curious, but she never was a horsewoman. Even as a girl she was rather timid with horses, and now she is very much afraid of them. As for an automobile, it fills her with terror. So it seems best to let her do the thing she enjoys, which is riding about the garden and scolding the gardeners.”
“I’m sure I didn’t mean to say anything disrespectful,” she said. “I was only describing things as they are.”
That her description was quite right, we were soon to see. Grandmother was still going about the garden when we got home, and it was plain that she had “everybody by the ears.” Young James was almost in tears, the head gardener was sulky, the boys who helped him were laughing, and every one was or pretended to be quite frightened.