Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/248

 spunk, that's the trouble. If she had, she'd make out to understand something now and then by her wits."

But this had been when grandma was only seventy or eighty years old, and the impatience of youth was not yet wholly subdued.

Now it was different. She had got used to seeing the large, loosely built figure always at her side, with its slightly bobbing head, which had once been such an annoyance to her, and she had come to appreciate the unobtrusive virtues of a faithful slave.

Aunt Betsy had not much spunk, it is true. Her wits seldom came to the assistance of herimperfect faculties. But she knew all her mother's needs and wishes by heart; and the absolutely unswerving devotion, day by day, and hour by hour, of the sixty odd years of her life had come, by the mere process of accumulation, to have the weight and importance in the old lady's mind which they deserved. The black eyes of the elder woman often looked approvingly at the meek old face in its pretty frame of soft gray curls. It was a pity that Betsy never knew that the reason she had not been allowed the dignity of a "false front," to which she had so ardently aspired, was because her mother thought her curls "too pretty to be covered up."

Once in a great while when Betsy had rendered her some especially timely service, the old lady had called her to her side to say: "Betsy you're