Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/36

26 uncomfortable after staying with your grand friends in London," she said, folding her napkin and putting it back into its ring.

Lucia said nothing. It was this sort of thing which she had meant when she told Maud they talked a different language at Brixham. But what was it possible to answer when Aunt Elizabeth spoke of her "grand friends"? And seeing she said nothing, Aunt Elizabeth proceeded to follow up her advantage.

"Though I do my best to make the house comfortable for you," she added tremulously. "If you have finished, Catherine, for what we have received"

Aunt Elizabeth had managed in the course of years and by dint of extreme ingenuity in disposing of the hours of the day to the least possible advantage, to make herself feel exceedingly busy. Every morning she had to read the paper and write her letters (or letter as the case might be), and what with ordering dinner, it was no wonder that it was lunch-time before she knew she had breakfasted. In the afternoon there was always some reason for going into the town, a distance of a mile, where, every day, she either ordered twopennyworth of worsted, or a needle, or counter-ordered something she had ordered the day before, or complained that something else had not come. Indeed, it seldom happened that she had not to go into Brixham between lunch and tea, so that the working day was already brim full. In addition she had often got to pay a call, which, by dint of much contrivance, had to be somehow wedged in, and on these occasions she was sometimes as much as a quarter of an hour late for tea, which again curtailed the hours between tea and dinner, which were dedicated to her worsted work, and this curtailment gave her the sense of being "driven." Charity in her case began at home with regard to her work, and her crochet-needle was more often than not employed in mending the voluminous wool-work with which her needle had already endowed Fair View Cottage. There were antimacassars (head-mats, she called them) over every chair, there was a woollen mat under every ornament, and over every footstool and under every lamp and candle in the place. The mats in fact were quite ubiquitous—pots of plants stood on them, books were disposed on them; whatever found place in Fairview Cottage had a mat to put it on. Thus it was usually nearly seven before she could get time to work at the shawl which at long intervals she gave to the old women of the workhouse, and since she dined at a quarter to eight their shawls got on very slowly. After dinner