At her house I invariably sat on a Brussels “kick-about” in the bay window and looked at a big leather “Wonders of Earth and Sea,” with illustrations. Sometimes she let me examine a basket of shells that she herself had gathered at the beach—I used to look at her hands and at her big, flat cameo ring and marvel that they had been so near to the ocean. Once or twice, when I wriggled too outrageously, she would let me go into the large, dim parlour, with its ostrich egg hanging from the chandelier and the stuffed blackbird under an oval glass case before the high mirror, and the coral piled under the centre-table and the huge, gilt-framed landscape which she herself had painted. But this day, between the lace curtains hanging from their cornices, I caught sight of Calista and Delia racing up the hill to the Rodmans, and the entire parlour was, so to say, poisoned. In desperation I went back and asked for a drink of water—my ancient recourse when things got too bad.
Aunt Barker’s was better—there was a baby there. But that day ill-luck went before me, for he was asleep and they refused to let me look at him, because they said that woke him up.
