Still, she isn't really unkind to children, and admits that they have a right to exist. She will boil me my glue-pot and make me paste, and lets Ariadne heat her curling-tongs between the bars of the kitchen fire. She doesn't "matter" cats, but she gives them their meals regular and doesn't hold with them loafing in the kitchen, and getting tit-bits stolen or bestowed. And they know she is just, though not generous, and never forgets their supper. They were all hid, as it happened, when she came about the place, but she said she knew she had got into a cat house as soon as she found herself eating fluff with her tea, and she thinks she ought to have been told. George laughs at her and calls her "stern daughter of the north," but he wasn't a bit cross when she told him that Ben ought to be sent to school. He even agreed, but Ben isn't sent. Ben is still eating his heart out, and he keeps telling Elizabeth Cawthorne so. He is much in the kitchen. She is very sensible. She just stuffs a jam tart into his mouth, and says, "Tak' that atween whiles then, my bonny bairn, to distract ye." Ben takes it like a lamb, and it does distract him, or at any rate it distends him; he has got fat since she came. She orders Mother about as if she were a child. Mother _does_ look very young, as I have said. She ought, and so ought Aunt Gerty, considering the trouble they both take to keep the cloven hoof of age off their faces. They go to bed with poultices of oatmeal on them, and Aunt Gerty once tried the raw-beef plaster. But what she does in the night she undoes in the day, with the grease paint and sticky messes that are part of her profession. She lives with us except when she is on tour, and is only here when she is "resting" in the _Era_, and all that time she is dreadfully cross, because she would rather be doing than resting, for "resting" is only a polite way of saying no one has wanted to engage her, and that she is "out of a shop," which all actresses hate. CHAPTER III I have forced George's hand, so I am told, and neither he nor mother take any notice of me. But Aunt Gerty hugged me all over when she heard what I had done, and scolded Mother for not being nice to me. "I don't see why you need put that poor child in Coventry?" she said. "You had more need to be grateful to her than not. How much longer was it going to go on, I want to know? Hiding away his lawful wife like an old Bluebeard, and me Sister Anne boiling over and wanting to call it all from the house-tops!" "Well, Gerty, you seem to have got it a bit mixed!" said Mother. "But, talking of Bluebeard, I always envied the first Mrs. B. the lots of cupboard room she must have had! I wonder if she was a hoarder, like me, who never have the heart to throw anything away? If I do happen to see the plans for the new house, I will speak up for lots of cupboards, and that is all I care about."