l my care! To see you hobnobbing
like a housemaid with these people!"

Aunt Anastasia always mentions the people here as who should say "the
worms in the flower-beds" or "the blight upon the rambler-roses."

"I wasn't hobnobbing, Auntie," I defended myself. "Er--he only offered
me the hose to----"

"The thinnest of excuses," put in my aunt, curling what was left
visible of her lips. "You need not have taken the hose."

"He put it right into my hand."

"Insufferable young bounder," exclaimed Aunt Anastasia, still more
bitterly.

I felt myself flushing hotly.

"Auntie, why do you always call everybody that who is not ourselves?" I
ventured. "'Honour bright,' the young man didn't do it in a bounder-y
way at all. I'm sure he only meant to be nice and neighbourly and----"

"That will do, Beatrice. That will do," said my Aunt majestically. "I am
extremely displeased with you. After all that I have said to you on the
subject of having nothing to do with the class of person among which we
are compelled to live, you choose to forget yourself over--over a garden
wall, and a hose, forsooth.

"For the future, kindly remember that you are my niece"--
(impressively)--"that you are your poor father's child"--(more
impressively)--"and that you are Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter"
--(this most impressively of all, with a stately gesture towards the
Gainsborough portrait hanging over the most rickety of bamboo tables).
"Our circumstances may be straitened now. We may be banished to an
odious little hovel in the suburbs among people whom we cannot possibly
know, even if the walls are so thin that we can hear them cleaning their
teeth next door. There is no disgrace in being poor, Beatrice. The
disgrace lies in behaving as if you did not still belong to our family!"

Aunt Anastasia always pronounces these last two words as if they were
written in capital letters, and as if she were uttering them in church.

"I am going to the library now to change my books," she concluded with
much dignity. "During my absence you will occupy yourself by making the
salad for supper."

"Yes, Auntie," I said in the resigned tone that so often covers seething
rebellion. Then a sudden thought struck me, and I suggested: "Hadn't
I--hadn't I better return that hose? It is simply pouring itself out all
over the lawn still----"

"I will return the hose," said my aunt, in the tragic tones of Mrs.
Siddons playing Lady Macbeth and saying "Give me