Page:The Tattooed Countess (1924).pdf/133



Ethel, the daughter, just back from her first year at Wellesley, on the other hand, was wont to demand suddenly: Why is a mouse when it spins? and being denied adequate reply, to answer the riddle herself thus: The higher, the fewer. She also had a fancy for reciting Jabberwocky. Wellesley, it seems, found Alice very smart this year. These terrible young people had taken to themselves the privilege of hailing the Countess as Aunt Ella. Merely to be in their presence made her grow older, and when she called on Mayme she breathed a sigh of relief if she learned that these juvenile monsters were off riding their bicycles, or rowing, or playing tennis.

Mayme Townsend herself was a woman of such strong personality that in a more favourable environment she would have been as outspoken about herself as she was here about others. In Maple Valley she was a social leader; people were afraid of her, but, Ella noted, not without irony, Mayme was afraid of herself too. They all were; that was it. They all were concealing something; skeletons dangled from the hooks in all their closets, skeletons whose every bone was dissected in the town but which the owner never referred to, this being