"My dear, one must spoil somebody, and I was determined not to spoil _you_; I wanted to save you. All my life was ruined because I was a spoiled child--and because I tried to write. I had such dreams, such ambitions--just like yours, you silly child! But then I was never clever--perhaps you may be--and it all ended in my losing my lover. He married a nice, quiet, domestic girl, and I never made name or fame at all--I never got anything taken but fashion articles--and 'Answers to Correspondents.' Now, that's the whole tale. Don't mention it again." "But you did love me, even when----" "Of course I did," said Aunt Kate in the testy tones of Aunt Eliza; "or why should I have bothered at all about whether you were going to be happy or not? Now, Kitty, you're not to expect me to gush. I've forgotten how to be sentimental except on paper." "I don't want to be sentimental," said Kitty, a little injured, "neither does----" Here the editor came in. "You don't want to be sentimental either," Kitty went on; "do you--Mr Editor?" The editor looked a little doubtful. "I want to be happy, at any rate," said he, "and I mean to be." "And he can't be happy unless you smile on him. Smile on him, Auntie!" cried a new, radiant Kitty, to whom aunts no longer presented any terrors. "Say 'Bless you, my children!' Auntie--do!" "Get along with your nonsense!" said Aunt Eliza. Or was it Aunt Kate? VIII MISS MOUSE They were poor, not with the desperate poverty that has to look on both sides of a penny, but with the decent bearable poverty that must look at a shilling with attention, and with respect at half-a-crown. There was money for the necessities of life, the mother said, but no money to waste. This was what she always tried to say when Maisie came in with rainbow representations of the glories of local "sales" piteous pictures of beautiful things going almost for nothing--things not absolutely needed, but which would "come in useful." Maisie's dress was never allowed those touches of cheap finery which would have made it characteristic of her. Her clothes were good, and she had to patch and mend and contrive so much that sometimes it seemed to her as though all her life was going by in the effort to achieve, by a distasteful process, a result which she abhorred. For her artistic sense was too weak to show her how the bright, soft freshness of her tints gained by contrast with the dull greys and browns and drabs that were her mother's choice--good wearing colours, from which the pink and white of her face rose triumphantly, like a beautiful flower out of a rough calyx.