The heel of Achilles E-Book

E. M. Delafield

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 265

Beschreibung

"I am an orphan," reflected Lydia Raymond, with immense satisfaction. She was a very intelligent little girl of twelve years old, and she remembered very well that when her father had died out in China, three years ago, it was her mother who had been the centre of attention and compassion. People had spoken about her poor dead father, and had praised him and pitied him, but their real attention had all been for the widow, who was there under their eyes, pathetic and sorrow-stricken. Lydia herself had been "poor little thing," but Grandpapa and her aunts and uncle had all told her that it was her mother who must be thought of now, and she knew that they kept on saying to one another that "the child will be a comfort to poor Mary." Her own individuality, which she felt so strongly, did not seem to count at all, and Lydia had, quite silently, resented that intensely, ever since she could remember anything at all.

Leseprobe

THE HEEL OF ACHILLES

BYE. M. DELAFIELD

. A.

To YOÉ: my sister, and always my greatest friend.

“Provinces twain o’er the land held sway, and the country was ruled by twain,

I made the laws, as King, but you, as Premier, revoked them again.

You were my faithful A.D.C., when I was the Captain bold,

But Watson I, to your Sherlock Holmes, in the Baker Street days of old.

We went through times that were strange and bad, and we shared and shared the same,

And talked and dreamed and planned of the day when we’d come to freedom and fame.

And the dreams came true, and the times were changed, and we did the things we’d planned—

(Don’t you remember the two Fur Coats, and the trips to Weston sand?)—

So now you work at a real Career, and I’m writing, in Singapore,

And send my book to my Twin—a token of all that has gone before.

A sign of the past—but a symbol, too, that is known to you and me,

Of the days together still to come, and the best that is yet to be.”

THE HEEL OF ACHILLES

I

“I am an orphan,” reflected Lydia Raymond, with immense satisfaction.

She was a very intelligent little girl of twelve years old, and she remembered very well that when her father had died out in China, three years ago, it was her mother who had been the centre of attention and compassion. People had spoken about her poor dead father, and had praised him and pitied him, but their real attention had all been for the widow, who was there under their eyes, pathetic and sorrow-stricken. Lydia herself had been “poor little thing,” but Grandpapa and her aunts and uncle had all told her that it was her mother who must be thought of now, and she knew that they kept on saying to one another that “the child will be a comfort to poor Mary.” Her own individuality, which she felt so strongly, did not seem to count at all, and Lydia had, quite silently, resented that intensely, ever since she could remember anything at all.

Once her mother had read her some extracts of old letters from her dead father, letters which had once come so regularly every week in thin blue envelopes with the Hong Kong postmark.

“Kiss our baby Lydia for me. I hope she is a good little thing always ... some day, when these years of hard work are over, you won’t have to sacrifice yourself any more, my poor Mary....” And, later on, in the last letter of all: “The child’s life is only a continuation of ours, my Mary.”

Long afterwards, Lydia, who never forgot the words, came to see them as the expression of man’s eternal wistful attempt to live on in the generation supplanting his own, but when her mother read them aloud to her, in a voice choked with tears, something in Lydia revolted violently.

“My life is my own,” she thought stubbornly, “not just a continuation of somebody else’s.”

With that acute clarity of vision that enabled her to analyze certain aspects of her childhood’s world with such astonishing maturity, she once told herself:

“They don’t love me for myself at all. Grandpapa doesn’t love me the least bit—he doesn’t love anybody. And mother loves me because I’m her child, and the aunts love me because I’m father’s child, and they think I’m a comfort to mother.”

She could hardly remember her father, and though at first she had shed tears over his death, Lydia had quickly dried them.

“Now, dear, you must be a good little girl and not cry and make poor mother more unhappy than she is already,” had said harassed-looking Aunt Evelyn. “You know you must think of her now. You’ll have to be her comfort.”

And almost immediately afterwards Aunt Evelyn had said to Lydia’s mother:

“Do, do give way and cry, dearie. It will be so much better for you. I know you’re wonderful, but you’ll suffer for it later on. You’re bound to.”

After that it had not needed Aunt Evelyn’s further observation that “poor little Lydia didn’t know what her loss meant” to dry Lydia’s perfunctory tears with the sting of an inflexible pride.

She would not cry again until they were prepared to concede to her the major right to affliction!

She did not love her mother very much. It is more common than is generally allowed, for an intelligent child, still in bondage to her natural instinct, reinforced by the tradition of allegiance to natural authorities, to couple that allegiance with a perfectly distinct antipathy to the personality of either or both parents. Lydia’s dislike of her mother’s sentimentality, her constant vacillation of purpose, and her incessant garrulity, was only unchildlike in her calm analysis of it, and in the conscious restraint that she put upon it.

Mrs. Raymond had often said, sometimes in Lydia’s hearing, that she would welcome death.

“But for little Lydia, I think I should have put an end to it all long ago. But how can I leave her, when she only has me?”

Mrs. Raymond, however, without any intervention of her own, when Lydia was twelve years old, reached the haven to which, since her husband’s death, she had so often aspired.

“I am an orphan.”

Lydia, already a dignified and self-contained little girl, bore herself with a new, pale composure.

It was for her that Aunt Evelyn, once more summoned from her shabby, untidy house at Wimbledon, was now hastily ordering mourning, and to whom the Wimbledon cousins had written brief, blotted letters of compassion and sympathy, and it was her future that Aunt Evelyn and Uncle George and Aunt Beryl had all been discussing under their breath whenever they thought she was not listening.

This, at least, was Lydia’s complacent conviction, until she overheard a few chance words about Grandpapa, and how best they could break it to him, when he was old, and his heart was weak—and he had, besides, never really got over the shock of poor Peter’s death, three years ago.

So it was Grandpapa they were thinking of now!

Lydia really felt very angry. Grandpapa, however, did not exact an undue amount of attention, on the whole.

“Grandpapa is old,” said Aunt Beryl, with a hint of apology in her voice. “Very old people don’t realize things quite in the same way—they’re more familiar with grief, perhaps.”

“The real blow was poor Peter’s death,” said Aunt Evelyn, also determined that Grandpapa should be accredited with his due meed of afflictions.

Aunt Beryl, who lived with Grandpapa, took Lydia to stay with them.

They had a house at the seaside, only two hours by train from London, and Aunt Evelyn came with them, ostensibly to see how Grandpapa was, but in reality, Lydia felt certain, in order to help them to decide upon her own future.

The two aunts talked to one another in anxious undertones all through the journey; their two, almost identical, black hats nodding so close together that Aunt Beryl’s hard straw brim kept on knocking against Aunt Evelyn’s stiff, upstanding bow of rigid crape. Although the younger one was still unmarried, Lydia’s two aunts had never lost a certain indefinable similarity of taste that always made them look as though they were dressed alike.

Aunt Evelyn was Mrs. Senthoven.

“You can remember it because of Beethoven,” she always said, with a nervous laugh. She had three children, and was several years older than her sister.

Miss Raymond might have been handsome in a small, beaky way but for her extreme thinness and the permanent anxiety in her light-brown eyes. “Beryl is the youngest bird in the old home nest, and is always with dear Grandpapa,” Aunt Evelyn and Uncle George were apt to say.

The youngest bird in the old home nest, growing yearly more pinched and vulture-like, invariably acquiesced eagerly in the pious formula, and thus enabled Aunt Evelyn to give her undivided attention to the straitened, clamorous household at Wimbledon, and Uncle George to leave his room in Grandpapa’s house untenanted during his fortnightly holiday from the office.

Now, however, he was at home, having gone straight back after the funeral. He met them at the station.

Uncle George was small and fair, with a habit of asking thoughtful questions of the kind apt to provoke hasty and inaccurate replies, which he then had the satisfaction of correcting.

He said, “Well, well, Lydia,” and gave her a little, awkward pat on the shoulder, that she quite understood to be expressive of his pity and sympathy.

“What about the ’bus?” said Aunt Beryl.

“No, no,” Aunt Evelyn protested quickly. “The walk would do us good. No need to take the ’bus.”

This was one of the fundamental differences between the aunts and Lydia’s mother. Mrs. Raymond had always taken a cab from the station, whether she had brought any luggage or no, when she came down to see Grandpapa. She had never seemed to be aware, as Lydia had privately always been aware, that the household in Regency Terrace thought very much the worse of her for the extravagance.

“The ’bus could take your bag, Evelyn. I know the man,” said Uncle George. “It will be quite all right.” He put out his hand for the small, dirty, brown suit-case that was weighing his sister down on one side.

“Well—I don’t know,” she hesitated. “I suppose it will be sixpence or more saved, if we carry it ourselves.” She laughed nervously.

“Better let the ’bus take it. I can say a word to the conductor,” persisted Uncle George, now burdened with the bag.

“Oh, it isn’t far. I think I’d rather keep an eye on it.”

“Just as you like.”

Uncle George raised his eyebrows, and they trudged away down the dusty station road.

Lydia was tired and hot in her new, fussy black clothes, and the contrast between her present discomfort and those condemned, self-indulgent ways of her mother, in the advantages of which she had always shared, brought a genuine realization of loss to her mind with a dull pang.

“What made your train late?” Uncle George inquired, patiently shifting the suit-case into his other hand.

“Was it late?”

“Surely. Wasn’t it, Beryl?”

“I think it was. About five or ten minutes.”

Her brother immediately looked astonished.

“Five or ten! The railway company would tell you that there is a very great difference. As a matter of fact, your train came in exactly seven-and-a-half minutes behind time.”

“Perhaps we started late,” wearily suggested Mrs. Senthoven. She was beginning to limp a little in her tight, black boots.

“Not very likely to do that. Probably you lost time at the Junction. The two-fifteen always has to wait about there. I’ve noticed it.”

“Probably that was it,” said Aunt Beryl, with tired acquiescence in the masculine infallibility on the subject of time-tables.

“I expect it was that. Let me see—you would have stopped only once before the Junction——”

The discussion, if it could be called one, when the only wish of the aunts was obviously to agree with Uncle George, lasted all the way to Regency Terrace.

Then Aunt Evelyn and Aunt Beryl both said, “Here we are!” and Uncle George put the suit-case down upon the lowest step of the stone flight that led to the front door as though by no possible feat of endurance could he have sustained its weight further.

“There’s Grandpapa,” said Mrs. Senthoven, looking up at a first-floor window, and nodding vigorously.

“George!” exclaimed Aunt Beryl reproachfully, “why is Grandpapa in the drawing-room? You know he always sits in the dining-room on week-days. With the parrot to keep him company and all.”

Her brother was spared the necessity of providing any explanation as to Grandpapa’s disregard of his privileges by the opening of the front door.

“Welcome, my dear child,” said Aunt Beryl very kindly to Lydia, and she kissed her.

Then she looked round sharply at the servant who had opened the door. Her face relaxed at the immaculate cap and apron that met her gaze, and she said graciously:

“Good afternoon, Gertrude.”

As they went into the dining-room, of which the door already stood open, Lydia heard Aunt Beryl say in tones of satisfaction:

“The girl really is improving at last. I’ve had such a time with her!”

“I wish I could get our girl at home to look half so smart,” said Aunt Evelyn, shaking her head. “But she’s got more than she can manage, with the house in the morning, and then the waiting at meals—Robert absolutely insists on that—and half her time she doesn’t dress in the afternoons at all, and I really can’t blame her. Just goes to the door with her arms all turned up, anyhow. Not that we have many callers,” sighed Aunt Evelyn. “I’ve had to give over social life altogether, practically; the children take such a lot of seeing to. Don’t ever marry a poor man, Beryl.”

The fiction still prevailed between the sisters that a choice of matrimonial projects lay ever before Miss Raymond.

“If you ladies have finished talking secrets——” said Uncle George, in reproachful reference to the rapid undertones employed by Lydia’s aunts.

“Yes, now what about Grandpapa?”

“He’ll want to see our little Lydia.”

“Poor child! Get her a little wine and a biscuit first, George.”

Lydia sat complacently at the square dining-room table, whilst Uncle George slowly unlocked the lower half of the sideboard and brought out a decanter with a very little red liquid in it, and Aunt Beryl produced, also from a locked receptacle, a small glass barrel containing three or four Albert biscuits.

“You sit here quietly, dear. Aunt Evelyn and I will go up to Grandpapa first.”

The aunts left the room together, and Lydia and Uncle George remained solemnly facing one another across the dining-room table. Lydia was much too self-possessed a little girl ever to feel any necessity for making conversation, and as her uncle remained silent, she occupied herself in gazing round the dining-room, familiar though it was to her already. The table was still covered with rather worn red baize; Grandpapa’s arm-chair, in which Grandpapa should by rights have been sitting now, still stood in the bay window, flanked by the small, round table which supported the parrot’s cage. The cage was covered with an old piece of green stuff now, and Lydia was glad of it. She was not at all fond of the parrot. Over the mantelpiece hung “The Monarch of the Glen,” and over the writing-table, at which no one ever wrote, but where Aunt Beryl did a good deal of sewing, was “Derby Day.” Lydia had heard Aunt Evelyn say that the detail in that picture always struck her as being quite wonderful.

The sideboard was the largest piece of furniture in the room, and it occupied almost the whole of one end of it. Lydia had often been told the story of the sideboard’s arrival at Regency Terrace—the impossibility of getting it in at the front door—Uncle George’s humorous suggestion that the roof of the house should be taken off—and finally its lengthy and strenuous entrance through a window, assisted by a large crane. It was a matter of everlasting regret to Lydia that this sensational progress should have taken place some twenty years before her own arrival into the world. In front of the empty grate stood a faded worked screen, its spiral legs embedded in the fluffy black hearth-rug.

“Oh,” said Lydia, suddenly reminded, “where is Shamrock?”

“Out, I suppose,” said Uncle George simply. Shamrock was Grandpapa’s dog, and Uncle George had good reason to disclaim all responsibility for Shamrock’s in-comings and out-goings.

“A seaside town, or, in fact, any town, is no place for a dog, in my opinion,” said Uncle George.

“Of course they have more fun in the country,” glibly returned his niece, who had never spent more than three consecutive days in the country anywhere, nor owned a dog in her life. “They can run after chickens and lambs, I suppose,” she added innocently.

“They can indeed!” ejaculated Uncle George. “But why lambs, Lydia?”

“I thought I’d seen pictures of dogs running after sheep, and barking at them to make them go the right way.”

“Sheep-dog! That’s another matter. Sheep are not lambs, child—nor is this the season for lambs.”

Uncle George looked happier, having found an opportunity for the bestowal of information.

Lydia secretly thought him very like Mr. Barlow in “Sandford and Merton,” and had no idea that her comparison was anything but complimentary.

“Have you ever read ‘Sandford and Merton,’ Uncle George?” she inquired conversationally. She had no idea of simulating a conventional grief for her mother with Uncle George, knowing instinctively that any such display would merely embarrass him. Uncle George liked one to be intelligent and very attentive to everything he said. Lydia had often asked him questions, the answers to which left her profoundly indifferent, merely for the sake of pleasing him. Her unconsciously cynical acknowledgment to herself of her own motives at least saved her from the charge of insincerity.

Lydia had seen so little of her grandfather during the last three years that she could not remember what he liked from little girls, although she retained a vivid impression, mostly gathered from her mother, that Aunt Evelyn’s noisy, slangy, hockey-playing Beatrice and Olive were not approved of by him.

Lydia, the precocious little only child of a mother half-enviously and half-contemptuously acknowledged to be “rather a fine lady” by the Raymonds and the Senthovens, was not likely to transgress in the same directions as Beatrice and Olive.

When Aunt Evelyn appeared at the dining-room door with her summons, Lydia followed her demurely upstairs. She remembered the steep, rather narrow staircase, with a blue carpet that gave place abruptly on the second flight to yellow oilcloth, and the ugly blue paper on the walls, quite well.

The drawing-room seemed altogether strange to her, but she was given no time to examine it.

“Here is little Lydia, Grandpapa,” said Aunt Beryl, who stood as though on guard behind the arm-chair in the bow window, that looked out on to a distant strip of grey sea.

How tiny Grandpapa was!

It quite shocked Lydia to see the minute proportions of the stiff little figure that sat back rigidly in the depths of the arm-chair.

Grandpapa’s hand was like a claw, and his eyes looked out of a network of wrinkles such as Lydia had never seen or imagined on a human countenance.

She half expected his voice to be in proportion, but it was in very sharp, incisive tones that he addressed her:

“How d’y do, my dear? You are very young to know grief.”

“Lydia has been very good and brave, and given us no trouble at all, Grandpapa,” said Aunt Beryl.

“That’s right. That’s quite right. How old are you, Lyddie?”

Lydia suddenly remembered that her grandfather had always called her “Lyddie,” although no one else ever did so.

“Twelve and a half, Grandpapa.”

“Can you read?”

“Oh, yes,” said Lydia, astonished.

“There is reading and reading,” said the old man rather grimly. “If yours is very good you can read to me in the mornings, and save your Aunt Beryl.”

“We shall have to see about some lessons for her in the mornings,” said Aunt Beryl rather repressively.

“Eh, what’s that? You don’t want to go to school, do you, my dear?”

Lydia wanted to go to school very much, and had always resented her mother’s refusal to send her there, and the irregular, desultory lessons at home, from which she knew that she learnt nothing useful.

But already she felt certain that to say so would not advance her cause with Grandpapa.

“I have never been to school,” she said at last.

“A very good thing too. I don’t like all this business of girls trying to be like boys, and learning all sorts of rough ways.”

Old Raymond cast a malicious glance at his daughter Evelyn, whose two girls attended a high school.

“You’re tired, Grandpapa,” she said gently and unresentfully, although she coloured.

“What made you sit in the drawing-room to-day?” asked Aunt Beryl. “You know you always stay in the dining-room until six o’clock.”

Grandpapa’s perfectly alert old face suddenly assumed a blank expression.

“Eh, my dear?” he said vacantly.

Aunt Beryl repeated the observation in a higher key.

“I can’t hear you,” said Grandpapa obstinately.

Aunt Evelyn and Aunt Beryl exchanged glances.

“Don’t do that, my dears, it’s very ill-bred. Even little Lyddie here can tell you that. Very bad manners to exchange glances. I suppose you thought I couldn’t see you, but I’ve got very good eyes yet.”

The old man chuckled gaily at the discomfiture on the faces of the two women.

“You must come downstairs now, Grandpapa. It’s tea-time,” said Aunt Beryl firmly.

Lydia wondered how anyone so very old and frail could ever be taken downstairs. Did Uncle George carry him? She saw with horror that neither of her aunts made any move to assist him as he leant forward and gripped a stout stick that stood against the arm-chair.

Then he began to slide down the seat of the deep chair, his old frame quite rigid, one hand clutching the arm of the chair, the other the stick.

“Oh!” cried Lydia involuntarily.

Grandpapa, his face tense and his breathing very loud, never looked at her, but both the aunts said, “Hush!”

So she stood quite silent, very much interested and rather frightened, while the tiny, taut old frame twisted itself to the perpendicular, and at last stood erect. Then, and then only, Grandpapa accepted the support of Aunt Beryl’s arm to supplement that of the stick as he went very, very slowly downstairs, one step at a time.

Aunt Evelyn, following behind with Lydia, explained to her that Grandpapa never allowed anyone to help him out of his chair.

“You will learn all the little ways of the house in time,” said Aunt Evelyn kindly. “You know we hope that this is to be your home.”

“Yes, auntie,” said Lydia submissively.

A dim, resentful consciousness was slowly creeping over her that “to learn all the little ways of the house” is the endless and often uncongenial concomitant to that orphaned state to which she had proudly laid claim.

II

It was not difficult to learn the routine of life at Regency Terrace. By the end of the autumn Lydia felt as though she had always lived there.

It was very monotonous.

Breakfast was at eight o’clock, and Lydia found herself expected to partake of bread-and-milk, to which she was not accustomed, and which rather annoyed her because she knew they only gave it to her in order to satisfy Grandpapa’s old-fashioned sense of the appropriate.

Immediately after breakfast she went out, so as to give Aunt Beryl time to see to the housekeeping before her lessons.

“A good brisk walk up and down the Front,” her aunt said encouragingly. “There are never many people there early.”

After September, indeed, there were hardly ever any people there at all.

Lydia did not dislike her solitary promenades from one end of the Esplanade to the other, except on the days when there was an east wind, when she hated it.

At first she was allowed to take Grandpapa’s dog, Shamrock, with her, although with many misgivings on the part of Aunt Beryl. Shamrock was reputedly a Sealyham terrier, and Grandpapa was inordinately attached to him. He roared with laughter when Uncle George said angrily that the dog made a fool of him by flattening himself under the front wheel of the bicycle which daily conveyed Uncle George to his office; and when Shamrock made all Regency Terrace hideous with howls, on the few occasions that Uncle George kicked him out of the way, Grandpapa’s deafness immediately assailed him in its most pronounced form, and he assured his daughter that he could hear nothing at all, and that it was all her fancy.

“Good little dog, Shamrock,” said Grandpapa approvingly, when Shamrock prostrated himself in an attitude of maudlin affection before the old man’s arm-chair, as he invariably did, to the disgust of the household.

He also showed himself scrupulously obedient to Grandpapa’s lightest word, although unfortunate Aunt Beryl might still be hoarse from prolonged cries at the hall-door in a vain endeavour to defend the bare legs of hapless little passing children, whom Shamrock took a delight in terrifying, although he never hurt them.

Lydia liked Shamrock because he always pranced along so gaily, and wagged his tail so effusively, and also because she suspected him of more than sharing her dislike of the parrot.

But their walks together were not a success. There was only one crossing, but Shamrock always contrived to negotiate it as badly as possible under an advancing tram, thus causing the driver to shout angrily at Lydia. He would simulate sudden, delighted recognitions of invalid old ladies in bath-chairs, and hurl himself upon them with extravagant demonstrations, until the bath-chair men, to most of whom he was only too well known, would seize him by the scruff of the neck and hurl him away.

Finally, as he never entered the house when Lydia did, but invariably contrived to give her the slip and extended the excursion by himself, Aunt Beryl no longer allowed her to take him out. Lydia was sorry, but she made no lamentations. If one lived with people, it was always better to conform to their wishes, she had long ago discovered. Her innate philosophy waxed with the disproportionate rapidity sometimes seen in children who are dependent on other than their natural surroundings, for a home.

Crudely put, she conformed to each environment in which she found herself, but—and in this, Lydia, without knowing it, was exceptional—she never lost a particle of her own strong individuality. She merely waited, quite unconsciously, for an opportunity when it might expediently be set free.

With Aunt Beryl she was a docile, rather silent little girl. Aunt Beryl gave her lessons every morning from “Little Arthur”, and set her arithmetic problems of which Lydia knew very well that she did not herself know the workings, and to which she merely looked up the answers in a key, and also made her practise scales upon the piano in the drawing-room.

“It will make your fingers nice and supple, even if one or two of the keys won’t sound,” said Aunt Beryl. “I’ll write a note to the piano tuner next week.”

But she never did.

Lydia thought gloomily that she was learning even less now than in the old days in London, when her mother had, at least, taught her scraps of French, and given her innumerable books to read. Aunt Beryl declared that Lydia could go on with French by herself, and a French grammar was bought.

“I’ll hear you say your verbs,” said Aunt Beryl, harassed, “but I’ve forgotten my accent long ago.”

As for books, there were none in the Regency Terrace house. When Aunt Beryl wanted to read, she had recourse to Weldon’s Fashion Journal, or to an occasional Home Chat. Grandpapa had the daily paper read to him, but her aunt once told Lydia that “Grandpapa used to be a great reader, but he can’t see now without glasses, and he won’t use them. So he never reads.”

Uncle George, indeed, often brought home a book from the Public Library in the evenings, but he did not offer to lend them to Lydia, neither did such titles attract her as “Goodman’s Applied Mechanics,” or somebody else’s “Theory of Heat, Light, and Sound”. Aunt Beryl, however, was kind, and when Lydia had once said that she liked reading, she promised her a story-book for Christmas. It was then October.

Meanwhile she taught her needlework, and Lydia learnt to make her own blouses, and to knit woollen underwear for a necessitous class vaguely designated by Aunt Beryl as “the pore”.

Sewing was the only thing that Aunt Beryl taught Lydia in such a way as to make it interesting. She had no lessons after dinner, which was in the middle of the day. Sometimes in the afternoon she walked slowly on the Esplanade with Aunt Beryl beside Grandpapa’s chair, but more often, as the weather grew colder, she and Aunt Beryl went out alone, and then they walked briskly into what Aunt Beryl called “the town”. The part where Regency Terrace stood was the “residential quarter”.

“The town” mainly consisted of King Street and one of those tributary streets where the shops were. Lydia rather liked the shopping expeditions with Aunt Beryl, and felt important when the grocer’s boy or the ironmonger’s young lady took an order, and said, “Yes, Miss Raymond. Good afternoon, Miss Raymond,” without asking for any address.

Sometimes when Aunt Beryl’s list was a long one, and the darkness of approaching winter fell early, she took Lydia in to have tea at a small establishment known to King Street as the “Dorothy Cayfe,” and the shopping was resumed afterwards, in the cheerful light of the prevalent gas. This happened seldom, however, as Aunt Beryl liked to be at home, in order to give Grandpapa his tea—which was not wonderful, since whenever she failed to do so her parent never omitted to make caustic allusion to the “long outing that she must have been enjoying in the good fresh air.”

When Aunt Beryl had duly been present at the rite of tea, however, it was an understood thing that she went out for a couple of hours afterwards, and left Lydia to entertain Grandpapa. “I am just going to step round to the Jacksons, dear, with my work. I’ll be back by six o’clock or so.” That was really the time that Lydia liked best.

She soon found out that with Grandpapa she might be her own shrewd, little cynical self. He only required outward decorum and an absence of any modern slang or noisiness, which accorded well with Lydia’s natural taste and early training.

She also speedily discovered that Grandpapa thought her clever and that so long as her opinions and judgments were her own, he was ready to listen to them with amusement and interest. Any affectation or insincerity he would pounce upon in a moment. “Don’t humbug,” he sometimes said sharply. “It’s the worst policy in the world. Humbug always ends in muddle.”

“Shamrock’s a humbug,” said the old man once, chuckling as he fondled the little white dog. “He’s a humbug and he’ll come to a bad end. When I’m dead, they’ll get rid of Shamrock. They think I’m taken in by his humbug, but I know he’s a bad dog.”

Lydia could not help thinking that “they” had some excuse in supposing Grandpapa to be blind and deaf to his protégé’s iniquities, but she put out her hand and patted the dog’s rough head.

“Would you look after Shamrock, Lyddie?”

“Yes, Grandpapa, I am very fond of him.”

“Why?” said Grandpapa sharply.

“Because he amuses me,” answered Lydia truthfully.

“Ah ha! we all find it amusing to see other people being made fools of!” was Grandpapa’s charitable sentiment. “Well, you shall have him one of these days, Lyddie. I hope you’ll have a good home to give him. What do you mean to do when you’re grown up?”

“Write books,” said Lydia.

To Aunt Beryl she would have said, “Get married and have two boys and a little girl, auntie”—but her Aunt Beryl would never have dreamt of asking her this question.

“Heigh?” said Grandpapa, in a rather astonished voice.

“Write books.”

“A blue stocking never gets a husband,” said Grandpapa sententiously.