I think Aunt Gerty is the reason why George fights so shy of his family. He hates her style, and yet he can hardly forbid Mother seeing as much as she likes of her own sister. The trail of the stage is over us all. Not that I see anything a bit wicked about the stage myself! I have never noticed anything at all wrong, and actors and actresses are the kindest people in the world! But there is a queer, worn, threadbare, rough, second-rate feeling about them. Off the stage--and I have never seen them on--they are tired and slouchy and easy-going. Aunt Gerty is most good-tempered and will do anything to help a pal, and takes things as they come; those are her good points. But she talks such a lot about herself, and never opens a book that isn't a novel, and wears cheap muslins and beaded slippers in the street, and lots of chains that seem to be always getting caught on men's buttons. She calls men "fellows." She is always going to play Juliet at one of the London houses. Meantime she puts up with provincial companies. She makes the best of it, and she tells us she is going to play Nerissa in the Bacon Company, as if she had got engaged for a parlourmaid in a good house, and discusses Ariel as if Ariel were a tweeny or up-and-down girl between the sky and the earth, and Puck a smart clever Buttons. She speaks of her nice legs as a workman might of his bag of tools. She can sing and dance, when she isn't asked to act. She has cut all her hair short to make it easier for wigs. Her great extravagance is in wigs. She calls them "sliding roofs" for convenience in talking about them in trains and omnibuses. When she did wear her own hair she dyed it, so I like the wigs better, as there's no deception. If Mother was ever an actress, which I don't somehow believe, though Jessie Hitchings said once that she had heard people say so, it has all been knocked out of her. She dresses very well, always in simpler things than Aunt Gerty. She left off her waist years ago, to please George, and now that it is the fashion not to have one, she is in the right box--I mean stays. Her hair is brown, and she mayn't frizzle it, so it is soft and pretty like a baby's. She generally wears black, over lovely white frilled petticoats that she gets up herself to keep the bills down. She has such little hands that she can pick her gloves out of the five-and-a-half boxes at sales, which are always much reduced. So few people have small hands. She may not wear high heels, and that is a grief to her, as she isn't very tall, but hers are very pretty feet, and she can dance.