I went home on Tuesday evening. I had no more very specially
interesting conversations with Miss Donnithorne; but she gave me during
the whole of Monday and all Tuesday, until it was time to put me into
the train for my return journey, a right royal time. I can speak of it
in no other way. I lived for the first time in my whole existence. She
managed to open up the world for me. She did not tell me about the dead
and gone great people, who to me were very musty and mouldy and
impossible; but she talked of living things--of birds and beasts and
flowers. She was great on flowers. She said the country was the right
place to live in, and the town was a very melancholy abode, and not
specially good for any one. But then she added, "It is the lot of some
girls and some men and women to live in the town, and when it is they
must make the best of it."
I began to consider her not only a most agreeable woman, but also a very
noble woman.
"Now, if you lived in our house, would you make things different?" I
said.
"I shall--" she began, and then she stopped.
"Oh yes, Dumps--yes. Your house isn't at all what it ought to be; it
isn't well ordered."
"How would you manage things? I wish you would tell me, Miss
Donnithorne--I really do--for now I have been with you, and eaten such
delicious meals, and been in such a pretty, very clean house, I see the
difference."
"It would be difficult for you to make much change," she said; "but of
course there are always things to be done. Your house wants--"
She paused to consider. There came a frown between her brows.
"Dumps dear," she said after a pause, "I cannot explain just now. Your
house wants--well, I will say it--to be turned topsy-turvy, inside out,
round about; to be--to be made as different from what it is now as the
sun is different from the moon."
"If that is the case I needn't trouble," I said in a sort of desponding
tone, "for Hannah won't work any harder, and I don't think I can; and
father likes his meals anyhow, and the boys and I--well, I suppose we
are poor; I'm sure I don't know, but there doesn't seem to be much
money. It will feel so strange when I go home."
"Trust to better times coming," said Miss Donnithorne. "The house can
be altered. I will write to you about it."
We were sitting by the fire on the last evening when she said this. I
turned to her.
"Why don't you tell me now?"
But she said, "No; it will be best to write. The fact is, I could not
tell you now; it will be best to write."
"What a darling little house this is!" was my next remark. "If only we
could have a sweet little house like this to live in in town, how happy
I should be!"
"It is a nice house," she said. "I don't think I'll give it up. In
fact," she added, "I have made up my mind not to."
"Were you thinking of moving?" I asked.
"I have made up my mind that the house shall remain--I mean that I shall
keep the house," was her unintelligible remark; and then she got very
red--quite scarlet--all over, and she walked to one of the bookcases,
opened it, and took out two volumes of _The Daisy Chain_ and two more of
_The Heir of Redclyffe_, and flung them into my lap.
"You haven't read those, have you?" she asked.
"Oh no," I replied, opening the first volume that came handy, and
dipping into its contents.
"I think you will like them," she said. "Take them back with you; put
them into your brown-paper parcel. I mean--" She stopped.
She was a funny woman, after all. Why did she draw herself up each
moment? It became almost irritating.
Well, the precious, darling, joyful time came to an end, and I was once
more in the train. I was in the train, but on the rack above me there
was no longer a brown-paper parcel--a hideous, humiliating brown-paper
parcel. On the contrary, there was a neat little trunk in the
luggage-van, and the only thing I had with me was my umbrella, which I
held in my hand. I was wearing the dark-blue dress with the grey fur,
so my hands were warm with my little grey muff, and altogether I was a
totally different creature from the girl who had travelled down to
Chelmsford on the Saturday before.
Hannah was waiting for me on one of the big platforms at Liverpool
Street Station. I was amused at the way she stared at me.
"Sakes!" she cried, "who's that?"