The Visits of Elizabeth | Page 7

have my hair
screwed off my head! But I feel for Agnès, only in a different way.
[Sidenote: A Quiet Evening]
It is a stuffy, boring place. You remember the house--enormous, tidy,
hideous, uncomfortable. Well, we had such a dinner last night after I
arrived--soup, fish, everything popped on to the table for Great-uncle
John to carve at one end, and Great-aunt Maria at the other! A regular
aquarium specimen of turbot sat on its dish opposite him, while Aunt
Maria had a huge lot of soles. And there wasn't any need, because there
were four men-servants in the room who could easily have done it at
the side; but I remember you said it was always like that when you
were a little girl. Well, it got on to puddings. I forgot to tell you, though,
there were plenty of candles on the table, without shades, and a
"bouquet" of flowers, all sorts (I am sure fixed in sand), in a gold
middle thing. Well, about the puddings--at least four of them were
planted on the table, awfully sweet and jammy, and Uncle John was
quite irritated with me because I could only eat two; and Aunt Maria,
who has got as deaf as a post, kept roaring to old Major Orwell, who
sat next her, "Children have no healthy appetites as in our day. Eh!
what?" And I wanted to scream in reply, "But I am grown up now,
Aunt Maria!"
Uncle John asked me every question over and over, and old Lady
Farrington's false teeth jumped so once or twice that I got quite nervous.
That is the party, me, Major Orwell, Lady Farrington, and Uncle and
Aunt.

When dessert was about coming, everything thing got lifted from the
table, and before you could say "Jack Robinson" off whisked the cloth.
I was so unprepared for it that I said "Oh!" and ducked my head, and
that made the cloth catch on old Lady Farrington's cap--she had to sit
on my side of the table, to be out of the draught--and, wasn't it dreadful,
it almost pulled it off, and with it the grey curls fixed at the side, and
the rest was all bald. So that was why it was so loose--there was
nothing to pin it to! And she glared at me, and fixed it as straight as she
could, but it had such a saucy look all the rest of the evening.
I did apologise as well as I could, and there was such an awkward
pause; and after dinner we had coffee in the drawing-room, and then in
a little time tea, and between times they sat down to whist, all but Aunt
Maria--so they had to have a dummy. She wanted to hear all about you,
she said, and my going to visit in France; and so I had to bellow
descriptions of your neuralgia, and about Mme. de Croixmare being my
godmother, &c., and Aunt Maria says, "Tut, tut!" as well as "Eh!
what?" to everything. I had not remembered a bit what they were like;
but I was only six, wasn't I, when we came last?
After she had asked every sort of thing about you under the sun, she
kept giving longing glances at the dummy's cards; so I said, "Oh! Aunt
Maria, I am afraid I am keeping you from your whist." As soon as I
could make her hear, you should have seen how she hopped up like a
two-year-old into the vacant seat; and they were far more serious about
it than any one was at Nazeby, where they had hundreds on, and Aunt
Maria and the others only played for counters--that long
mother-o'-pearl fish kind. I looked at a book on the table, Lady
Blessington's "Book of Beauty," and I see then every one got born with
champagne-bottle shoulders. Had they been paring them for
generations before, I wonder? Because old John, the keeper at Hendon,
told me once that the best fox-terriers arrive now without any tails,
their mothers' and grand-mothers' and great-grandmothers' having been
cut off for so long; but I wonder, if the fashion changed, how could
they get long tails again? There must be some way, because all of us
now have square shoulders. But what was I saying? Oh! yes, when I
had finished the "Beauty Book," I heard Aunt Maria getting so cross

with the old boy opposite her. "You've revoked, Major Orwell," she
said, whatever that means.
[Sidenote: An Old English Dinner]
Then hot spiced port came in--it was such a close night--and they all
had some, and so did I, and it was good; and then candles came. Such
lovely silver, and so beautifully cleaned; and Aunt and Uncle kissed me.
I dodged Lady Farrington's false teeth, because, after