Aunt Deen kept strenuous watch outside of the house. To get inside you had, like the wolf in Hans Christian Andersen, to show a white paw like a sheep. She designated by the name of _they_ the invisible foes that were supposed to be investing it. For a long time these mysterious _they_ terrified us. We used to look around whenever she spoke of them. By dint of never meeting them we at last came to laugh at them, little thinking that this laugh disarmed us, and that thus disarmed we should surely meet them later in flesh and blood. Her loyalty was never caught napping. The moment the family was in question she would insist upon a meed of praise being at once awarded it, failing which she promptly assumed the defensive, ready for battle. A certain person who ventured to speak of it in colourless terms found himself scanned from head to foot, and to mask his sense of defeat took refuge in sarcasm: “I forgot,” said he, “that your house was the Ark of the Covenant.” “And yours Noah’s Ark,” she retorted with a _tic_ for his _tac_, knowing that her interlocutor harboured all sorts of shady folk. In those days the bread was made in the kitchen in a kneading trough nearly a hundred years old, before being carried for baking to the town oven. Aunt Deen, who loved all sorts of cookery, used to oversee the operation, and even at times take a hand in it herself. One day when I was looking on, at the moment when the servant was about to mingle the flour, water and leaven, my aunt suddenly gave her a vigorous shake. “What are you thinking of, girl?” “Mixing the bread, miss.” “You are forgetting the sign of the cross.” For in serious houses no one omitted the sign of the cross over white flour that was on the point of being made into bread. At table, before cutting the loaf, father never failed to trace upon it a cross, with two strokes of the knife. When it fell to grandfather to cut the bread I was quick to notice that he did nothing of the kind. That was one of my first surprises. From my earliest days I understood the importance of differences of opinion in matters religious.