Mrs Hamps had splendidly arrived. The atmosphere of the sitting-room
was changed. Maggie, smiling, wore her second-best black silk apron.
Clara, smiling and laughing, wore a clean long white pinafore. Mrs
Nixon, with her dreamy eyes less vacant than usual, greeted Mrs Hamps
effusively, and effusively gave humble thanks for kind inquiries after
her health. A stranger might have thought that these women were
strongly attached to one another by ties of affection and respect.
Edwin never understood how his sisters, especially Maggie, could
practise such vast and eternal hypocrisy with his aunt. As for him, his
aunt acted on him now, as generally, like a tonic. Some effluence from
her quickened him. He put away the worry in connection with his father,
and gave himself up to the physical pleasures of tea.
Aunt Clara was a handsome woman. She had been called--but not by men
whose manners and code she would have approved--`a damned fine woman.'
Her age was about forty, which at that period, in a woman's habit of
mind, was the equivalent of about fifty to-day. Her latest photograph
was considered to be very successful. It showed her standing behind a
velvet chair and leaning her large but still shapely bust slightly over
the chair. Her forearms, ruffled and braceleted, lay along the fringed
back of the chair, and from one negligent hand depended a rose. A heavy
curtain came downwards out of nothing into the picture, and the end of
it lay coiled and draped on the seat of the chair. The great dress was
of slate-coloured silk, with sleeves tight to the elbow, and thence,
from a ribbon-bow, broadening to a wide, triangular climax that revealed
quantities of lace at the wrists. The pointed ends of the sleeves were
picked out with squares of velvet. A short and highly ornamental
fringed and looped flounce waved grandly out behind from the waist to
the level of the knees; and the stomacher recalled the ornamentation of
the flounce; and both the stomacher and flounce gave contrasting value
to the severe plainness of the skirt, designed to emphasise the quality
of the silk. Round the neck was a lace collarette to match the
furniture of the wrists, and the broad ends of the collarette were
crossed on the bosom and held by a large jet brooch. Above that you saw
a fine regular face, with a firm hard mouth and a very straight nose and
dark eyebrows; small ears weighted with heavy jet ear-rings.
The photograph could not render the clear perfection of Aunt Clara's
rosy skin; she had the colour and the flashing eye of a girl. But it
did justice to her really magnificent black hair. This hair was all her
own, and the coiffure seemed as ample as a judge's wig. From the low
forehead the hair was parted exactly in the middle for about two inches;
then plaited bands crossed and recrossed the scalp in profusion, forming
behind a pattern exceedingly complicated, and down either side of the
head, now behind the ear, now hiding it, now resting on the shoulders,
now hanging clear of them, fell long multitudinous glossy curls. These
curls--one of them in the photograph reached as far as the stomacher--
could not have been surpassed in Bursley.
She was a woman of terrific vitality. Her dead sister had been nothing
in comparison with her. She had a glorious digestion, and was the envy
of her brother-in-law--who suffered much from biliousness--because she
could eat with perfect impunity hot buttered toast and raw celery in
large quantities. Further, she had independent means, and no children
to cause anxieties. Yet she was always, as the phrase went, `bearing
up,' or, as another phrase went, `leaning hard.' Frances Ridley
Havergal was her favourite author, and Frances Ridley Havergal's little
book _Lean Hard_, was kept on her dressing-table. (The girls, however,
averred that she never opened it.) Aunt Clara's spiritual life must be
imagined as a continual, almost physical leaning on Christ.
Nevertheless she never complained, and she was seldom depressed. Her
desire, and her achievement, was to be bright, to take everything
cheerfully, to look obstinately on the best side of things, and to
instil this religion into others.
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