To return to the dinner-table, Miss Jillgall addressed herself, with an air of playful penitence, to my father.
“Dear cousin, I hope I have not done wrong. Helena left me all by myself. When I had finished darning the curtain, I really didn’t know what to do. So I opened all the bedroom doors upstairs and looked into the rooms. In the big room with two beds--oh, I am so ashamed--I found this book. Please look at the first page.”
My father looked at the title-page: “Doctor Watts’s Hymns. Well, Selina, what is there to be ashamed of in this?”
“Oh, no! no! It’s the wrong page. Do look at the other page--the one that comes first before that one.”
My patient father turned to the blank page.
“Ah,” he said quietly, “my other daughter’s name is written in it--the daughter whom you have not seen. Well?”
Miss Jillgall clasped her hands distractedly. “It’s my ignorance I’m so ashamed of. Dear cousin, forgive me, enlighten me. I don’t know how to pronounce your other daughter’s name. Do you call her Euneece?”
The dinner was getting cold. I was provoked into saying: “No, we don’t.”
She had evidently not forgiven me for leaving her by herself. “Pardon me, Helena, when I want information I don’t apply to you: I sit, as it were, at the feet of your learned father. Dear cousin, is it--”
Even my father declined to wait for his dinner any longer. “Pronounce it as you like, Selina. Here we say Euni’ce--with the accent on the ‘i’ and with the final ‘e’ sounded: Eu-ni’-see. Let me give you some soup.”
Miss Jillgall groaned. “Oh, how difficult it seems to be! Quite beyond my poor brains! I shall ask the dear girl’s leave to call her Euneece. What very strong soup! Isn’t it rather a waste of meat? Give me a little more, please.”
I discovered another of Miss Jillgall’s peculiarities. Her appetite was enormous, and her ways were greedy. You heard her eat her soup. She devoured the food on her plate with her eyes before she put it into her mouth; and she criticised our English cookery in the most impudent manner, under pretense of asking humbly how it was done. There was, however, some temporary compensation for this. We had less of her talk while she was eating her dinner.
With the removal of the cloth, she recovered the use of her tongue; and she hit on the one subject of all others which proves to be the sorest trial to my father’s patience.