An unusual occurrence gave him the opportunity to turn over a new leaf
immediately. The sounds of the front-door bell and of voices in the
hall were followed by the proud entrance of Auntie Hamps herself into
the dining-room.
"Now don't disturb yourselves, please," Mrs Hamps entreated. She often
began with this phrase.
Maggie sprang up and kissed her, somewhat effusively for Maggie, and
said in a quiet, restrained tone--
"Many happy returns of the day, auntie."
Then Edwin rose, scraping his arm-chair backwards along the floor, and
shook hands with her, and said with a guilty grin--
"A long life and a merry one, auntie!"
"Eh!" she exclaimed, falling back with a sigh of satisfaction into a
chair by the table. "I'm sure everybody's very kind. Will you believe
me, those darling children of Clara's were round at my house before
eight o'clock this morning!"
"Is Amy's cough better?" Maggie interjected, as she and Edwin sat down.
"Bless ye!" cried Auntie Hamps, "I was in such a fluster I forgot to ask
the little toddler. But I didn't hear her cough. I do hope it is.
October's a bad time for coughs to begin. I ought to have asked. But
I'm getting an old woman."
"We were just arguing whether you were thirty-eight or thirty-nine,
auntie," said Edwin.
"What a tease he is--with his beard!" she archly retorted. "Well, your
old aunt is sixty this day."
"Sixty!" the nephew and niece repeated together in astonishment.
Auntie Hamps nodded.
"You're the finest sixty I ever saw!" said Edwin, with unaffected
admiration.
And she was fine. The pride in her eye as she made the avowal--probably
the first frank avowal of her age that had passed those lips for thirty
years--was richly justified. With her clear, rosy complexion, her white
regular teeth, her straight spine, her plump figure, her brilliant gaze,
her rapid gestures, and that authentic hair of hers falling in Victorian
curls, she offered to the world a figure that no one could regard
without a physical pleasure and stimulation. And she was so shiningly
correct in her black silk and black velvet, and in the massive jet at
her throat, and in the slenderness of her shoe! It was useless to
recall her duplicities, her mendacities, her hypocrisies, her
meannesses. At any rate she could be generous at moments, and the
splendour of her vitality sometimes, as now, hid all her faults. She
would confess to aches and pains like other folk, bouts of rheumatism
for example--but the high courage of her body would not deign to ratify
such miserable statements; it haughtily repelled the touch of time; it
kept at least the appearance of victory. If you did not like Auntie
Hamps willingly, in her hours of bodily triumph, you had to like her
unwillingly. Both Edwin and Maggie had innumerable grievances against
her, but she held their allegiance, and even their warm instinctive
affection, on the morning of her sixtieth birthday. She had been a lone
widow ever since Edwin could remember, and yet she had continued to
bloom. Nothing could desiccate nor wither her. Even her sins did not
find her out. God and she remained always on the best terms, and she
thrived on insincerity.
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