Jenny can hardly be said to have missed her father, except through her mother, who seemed suddenly to grow a little deafer, a little more dim-sighted, just a trifle less brisk and busy than before, and with a touch about her of that old-age awesomeness that mutters to itself in corners and seems to know strange things. Yes, Jane missed her John. Her old heart knew that he was no longer sitting in the kitchen. CHAPTER XV JENNY'S BOTTOM DRAWER Jenny and her old mother began to grow closer to each other at this time. Perhaps it was because the old woman felt lonelier, and perhaps, too, because the loss of her old man had sent her thoughts wandering among the enchanted fields of her young days, that she began to talk sometimes to Jenny about her marriage, and to give her quaint advice on the subject of "managing" husbands; "as if," Jenny smilingly said to herself, "an old man like father was the same, belonged even to the same race, as Theophil." Perhaps Mrs. Talbot scented some such reflection in Jenny's expression; at all events, she answered it with an "Eh, but all men are alike, my dear, under their skins,--all alike, and they need humouring and managing just in the same way, prince or peasant." The idea of "managing" Theophil had something repulsive in it for Jenny; there was an element of deceit, of cunning, implied which didn't go with her ideas of true love and the life beautiful of which she was dreaming. She didn't believe that men and women who loved were really different from each other, and perhaps she was right. About this time, too, Mrs. Talbot began to produce from mysterious treasure-caves, entered apparently from an old press in her bedroom, all kinds of wonderful things which would be useful to Jenny some day in her house: terrible little ornaments,--very sacred, though,--sad quaintnesses of the spirit of beauty pathetically fumbling about in country brains; wool mats worked in the primary colours; and such wool wonders as a wool basket of flowers, in which real wool flowers grew out of a wool basket which you held by an over-arching wool handle, the whole worked with undeniable but how forlorn ingenuity,--a prehistoric relic of Mrs. Talbot's legendary school-days: survivals from a period which is best summed up in the one wonderful word "antimacassar," a period when for some unrecorded reason men and women had to protect their furniture against their oleaginous selves, and beautiful locks were guarded from lover's fingers by coats of triple oil. But these were things worth having, too,--bits of old lace and prim embroidery, that bore the stamp of a refinement that is never old-fashioned; and when Mrs. Talbot descended from the beautiful she could show you real treasures.