Page:Burnett - Two Little Pilgrims' Progress A Story of the City Beautiful.djvu/19

Rh time to spend with children. She had an enormous farm, and managed it herself with a success and ability which made her celebrated in agricultural papers. If she had not given her dead brother's children a home they would have starved, or been sent to the poorhouse. Accordingly, she gave them food to eat and beds to sleep in, but she scarcely ever had time to notice them. If she had had time to talk to them, she had nothing to say. She cared for nothing but crops and new threshing-machines and fertilisers; and they knew nothing about such things.

"She never says anything but ‘Go to bed’, ‘Keep out of the way.’ She's not like a woman at all," Meg commented once; "she's like a man in woman's clothes."

Their father had been rather like a woman in man's clothes. He was a gentle, little, slender man, with a large head. He had always been poor, and Mrs. Matilda Jennings had regarded him as a contemptible failure. He had had no faculty for business or farming. He had taught school and married a schoolteacher. They had had a small house, but somehow it had been as cosy as it was tiny. They had managed to surround themselves with an atmosphere of books by buying the cheap ones they could afford, and borrowing the expensive ones from friends and