Beth took charge of the housekeeping as soon as they arrived, made tea, arranged the groceries in the cupboard, and put the key in her pocket; and Aunt Victoria, who was sitting upright on a high Chippendale chair, knitting, and enjoying the dignity of the old attitude after her journey, looked on over her spectacles in pleased approval. Before they went to bed, they read the evening psalms and lessons together in the sitting-room, and Aunt Victoria read prayers. When they went upstairs they said their private prayers, kneeling beside the bed, and Aunt Victoria made Beth wash herself in hot water, and brush her hair for half-an-hour. Aunt Victoria attributed her own slender, youthful figure and the delicate texture of her skin to this discipline. She said she had preserved her figure by never relaxing into languid attitudes, and her complexion by washing her face in hot water with fine white soap every night, and in cold water without soap every morning. She did not take her fastidious appetite into consideration, nor her simple, regular life, nor the fact that she never touched alcohol in any shape or form, nor wore a tight or heavy garment, nor lost her self-control for more than a moment whatever happened, but Beth discovered for herself, as she grew older, that these and that elevated attitude of mind which is religion, whatever the form preferred to express it, are essential parts of the discipline necessary for the preservation of beauty. In the morning Beth made breakfast, and when it was over, if crusts had accumulated in the cupboard, she steeped them in hot milk in a pie-dish, beat them up with an egg, a little butter, sugar, currants, and candied peel, and some nutmeg grated, for a bread-pudding, which Prentice took out to bake for dinner, remarking regularly that little miss promised to be helpful, to which Aunt Victoria as regularly responded Yes, she hoped Miss Beth would become a capable woman some day. After breakfast they read the psalms and lessons together, verse by verse, and had some "good talk," as Beth called it. Then Aunt Victoria got out an old French grammar and phrase-book, a copy of "Telemaque," and a pocket-dictionary, treasured possessions which she always carried about with her, and had a kind of pride in. French had been her speciality, but these were the only French books she had, and she certainly never spoke the language. She would have shrunk modestly from any attempt to do so, thinking such a display almost as objectionable as singing in a loud professional way instead of quietly, like a well-bred amateur, and showing a lack of that dignified reserve and general self-effacement which she considered essential in a gentlewoman.