Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 1.djvu/38

24 for a great deal more, I, at least, go back a good deal further. Though I'm three years older we were brought together as girls by one of the strongest of all ties—the tie of a common aversion."

"Oh, I know your common aversion!" Mrs. Beever spoke with her air of general competence.

"Perhaps then you know that her detestable stepmother was, very little to my credit, my aunt. If her father, that is, was Mrs. Grantham's second husband, my uncle, my mother's brother, had been the first. Julia lost her mother; I lost both my mother and my father. Then Mrs. Grantham took me: she had shortly before made her second marriage. She put me at the horrid school at Weymouth at which she had already put her step-daughter."

"You ought to be obliged to her," Mrs. Beever suggested, "for having made you acquainted."

"We are—we've never ceased to be. It was as if she had made us sisters, with the delightful position for me of the elder, the protecting one. But it's the only good turn she has ever done us."

Mrs. Beever weighed this statement with her alternative, her business manner. "Is she really then such a monster?"