"To bed, all of you!" she exclaimed. "To bed and to sleep! Now,
Prissie, you are not to mind a word that child says. Come into the
drawing-room and let us have a few words quietly. Oh, yes, I'll lie on
the sofa, my dear, if you wish it. But Hattie is wrong; I don't do it
every night. I suffer no pain either, Prissie. Many a woman of my age
is racked with rheumatics."
The last words were said with a little gasp. The elder woman lay back
on the sofa with a sigh of relief. She turned her face so that the
light from the lamp should not reveal the deathly tired lines round
it.
Aunt Raby was dressed in a rough homespun garment. Her feet were clad
in unbleached cotton stockings, also made at home; her little,
iron-gray curls lay flat at each side of her hollow cheeks. She wore
list slippers, very coarse and common in texture. Her whole appearance
was the essence of the homely, the old-fashioned, even the ungainly.
Priscilla had seen elegance and beauty since she went away; she had
entered into the life of the cultivated, the intellectually great. In
spite of her deep affection for Aunt Raby, she came back to the
ugliness and the sordid surroundings of home with a pang which she
hated herself for feeling. She forgot Aunt Raby's sufferings for a
moment in her uncouthness.
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