Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/236



" may be sure that Miss Antrobus's sheets will be well aired, Mrs. Rochester. I may be old-fashioned, but I believe in airing everything: sheets, pillow-cases, cushion-covers, towels—all are aired here, and aired thoroughly, you may rely upon it."

Thus spoke very gently and seriously, in a sweet, faded voice, a delicious old lady in brown satin. Her grey hair was crowned with a cap of soft lace, and her chin—rather too rounded for age, if one could have seen it properly—was buried in a lace fichu. Mr. Hugo had given the invaluable hint that convex shoulders suggest a concave chest—and the old lady stooped a good deal. Her hands, where the mittens let them show, were made up with consummate art and the tiniest grey wrinkles. Her forehead was very wrinkled, and these wrinkles were not painted—they were actual corrugations, fine and deep. Even in the soft light of the drawing-room lamp, which Jane had hastily veiled with a blue chiffon scarf, the wrinkles showed plainly. The old lady sat in a big chair, her feet on a footstool, and on her satin lap knitting lay.

Mrs. Rochester sat quite near her—trusting, talkative. You may wonder that she did not recall that her buffeting at the hands of Jane had been due to Jane's having mistaken her for her cousin "dressed up," and hence made the short, irresistible deduction. But then you must remember that her own son had endorsed the fiction of Aunt Harriet's existence, and, above all, you must allow for the indiarubber