THE BULLERS--MATILDA TAKES ME UP--WE FALL OUT--MR. GEORGE. Major Buller took me home to his house after my father's death. My father had left his affairs in his hands, and in those of a friend in England--the Mr. Arkwright he had spoken of. I believe they were both trustees under my mother's marriage settlement. The Bullers were relations of mine. Mrs. Buller was my mother's cousin. She was a kind-hearted, talkative lady, and good-looking, though no longer very young. She dressed as gaily as my poor mother, though, somehow, not with quite so good an effect. She copied my mother's style, and sometimes wore things exactly similar to hers; but the result was not the same. I have heard Mrs. Minchin say that my mother took a malicious pleasure, at times, in wearing costumes that would have been most trying to beauty less radiant and youthful than hers, for the fun of seeing "poor Theresa" appear in a similar garb with less success. But Mrs. Minchin's tales had always a sting in them! Mrs. Buller received me very kindly. She kissed me, and told me to call her "Aunt Theresa," which I did ever afterwards. Aunt Theresa's daughters and I were like sisters. They showed me their best frocks, and told me exactly all that had been ordered in the parcel that was coming out from England. "Don't you have your hair put in papers?" said Matilda, whose own curls sat stiffly round her head as regularly as the rolls of a lawyer's wig. "Are your socks like lace? Doesn't your Ayah dress you every afternoon?" Matilda "took me up." She was four years older than I was, which entitled her to blend patronage with her affection for me. In the evening of the day on which I went to the Bullers, she took me by the hand, and tossing her curls said, "I have taken you up, Margery Vandaleur. Mrs. Minchin told Mamma that she has taken the bride up. I heard her say that the bride was a sweet little puss, only so childish. That's just what Mrs. Minchin said. I heard her. And I shall say so of you, too, as I've taken you up. You're a sweet little puss. And of course you're childish, because you're a child," adds Miss Matilda, with an air. For had not she begun to write her own age with two figures? Had I known then as much as I learned afterwards of what it meant to be "taken up" by Mrs. Minchin, I might not have thought the comparison a good omen for my friendship with Matilda. To be hotly taken up by Mrs. Minchin meant an equally hot quarrel at no very distant date. The squabble with the bride was not slow to come, but Matilda and I fell out first. I think she was tyrannical, and I know I was peevish. My Ayah spoilt me; I spoke very broken English, and by no means understood all that the Bullers said to me; besides which, I was feverishly unhappy at intervals about my father.