Page:Hollyhock house; a story for girls (IA hollyhockhousest00tagg).pdf/23

Rh The girls had never thought much about their mother. The Gardens had been too well-bred to decry her to her children, but they had gathered the impression that she “did not amount to much,” a fearful indictment from a Garden! Mary had silently felt, in a hurt way, that she could never have left three little girls, no matter to whom, and she had not talked about their mother, even to her sisters. As time went on, without being told so, the Garden girls came to imagine that their mother was dead. This impression of one whom only Mary remembered vaguely could not sadden them. They were motherless; but, though they envied girls with loving fathers and mothers, they had a great deal. Each in her way, the three Garden girls were philosophers and did not imagine they were unhappy when they were not, since no life holds every form of good.

They had the solid, fine old house; Win Garden, Winchester, their father’s half-brother, only twenty-four years old, so big-brotherly that it was silly to call him uncle, and they never did; and the Garden. The square house of pressed brick stood in a garden, a great, old-fashioned garden, blooming around it, as the house bloomed amid it, with its rosebud girls. Sometimes the