To be sure, they had frequent callers, for they were greatly respected by their fellow-townspeople, and these calls were returned after the proper interval of time had elapsed. Into this quiet household of five maiden ladies was suddenly precipitated a twelve-year-old niece. Their only brother, Theodore by name, who was very much younger than themselves, had early in life left the quiet old home in Alden, and gone to one of the large cities, where he married and became a prosperous business man. Circumstances now obliged him to go to South America for six or eight months, and rather than subject their only daughter Theodora to the dangers of the climate, Mr. and Mrs. Middleton had asked her aunts to take charge of her until their return. The five aunts were somewhat aghast at this proposition. Since Miss Thomasine had given up her dolls and packed them tenderly away in the attic many, many years ago, childhood was unknown to them, for Theodora's home was far away, and she had never visited them before. However, it was a girl--a boy would have been absolutely impossible--and next to Theodore she was their nearest of kin. And Mrs. Middleton herself had suggested a means of relief should her daughter prove to be too much care for them. "If you grow tired of her, or if she gives you any trouble, send her to boarding-school. She will be happy at Miss Ford's, where I went, and I have made every arrangement for her to go if she should be too much for you. But I am sure no one could grow tired of my Teddy!" At first all went well. The aunts felt so sorry for poor little Theodora when she was left for the first time in her life without her parents that they vied with one another in their efforts to make her happy. Miss Thomasine unpacked her dolls and carried them carefully downstairs, smelling strongly of camphor, and seeming to blink their round, unseeing black eyes in the unaccustomed glare of day. But Theodora only looked at them with a languid curiosity, spoke of their being so "funny and old-fashioned," and then sneezed from the fumes of the camphor, and turned away. Miss Joanna unlocked the corner cupboard and brought out her own china tea-set, unplayed with now these fifty years. But Theodora almost laughed at the clumsy shape of the sugar-bowl, and then accidentally broke it, upon which Miss Joanna locked them all up again with an air which showed that Theodora had handled them for the last time. Miss Melissa then produced some books, which her niece seized upon with avidity. But she soon declared that she did not care for that kind of story (they were some of Miss Edgeworth's tales), that Rosamond was a perfect goose to think the purple vase was worth having. She, Theodora, would have known better the moment she saw it. _She_ would have discovered at once that it was filled with a purple powder, and was really nothing but plain glass.