Page:An American Girl in India.djvu/14

 times when he made it impossible for you even to do that. This afternoon was certainly one of them.

I had just been reading out a portion of a letter I had received that morning from Berengaria Hugesson-Willoughby, asking me to go out to India to spend the winter with her, including the Great Durbar which even then was beginning to swallow up as a topic of conversation all other events past, present, and to come. Berengaria—so called by her godfather and godmothers in her baptism, for which act she has ever shown marked ingratitude—is a first cousin of ours once removed, and about ten years ago she had married a man who is something or other in India—I forget what, but Aunt Agatha would be sure to know. We were all discussing the advisability of my accepting her invitation.

Aunt Agatha suddenly raised her eyes from the woollen muffler she has been knitting for the last two years for a deep sea fisherman, and looked at me with an air of finality.

'You had best go right away now you have got the chance,' she said, and immediately resumed her work of charity with an air of having once and for all closed the discussion.

Now I have long noticed as an indisputable fact that when Aunt Agatha says one should do a thing one generally does it. Not that I am at all of a weak disposition or easily led—my worst enemy could not call me that—but there are some people who have an indefinable air of command about them. My Aunt Agatha certainly has. Unkind people,