She told Nina that once there had been a young spark like Hal, tall and broad and with nice manners and steady grey-blue eyes--“Did he--was he--drowned, Aunt Lavvy?” in a whisper; and after a long pause--“Yes, my dear....” So Nina and Aunt Lavvy shared this secret and were great friends. But she puzzled Nina by liking Bunny too--and how could any one who saw the glory of Hal, put up with Bunny, who was always tearing about and whistling and getting into trouble and being gaily impudent to his elder sisters--“You don’t know everything, Nina.” “My poor lad, and you don’t know anything.” This was family repartee. But Bunny had once tiptoed in to Aunt Lavvy’s room when she lay in bed with a headache, and tilted the entire remains of his mother’s bottle of eau-de-Cologne--borrowed for the occasion--over the sufferer’s forehead and into her eyes.... He, too, was a dear boy. Aunt Lavvy remembered these little things. Nina, whenever re-adopted by yet another childless couple anxious to give this bright young creature a good time, was always glad to introduce Aunt Lavvy to them on first bringing them to the Laburnums; and only regretful that she could not truthfully say: “This is my mother, dear Mrs. Mathers; Mother dear, this is Mrs. Mathers, who has been so kind to me----” _Why_ was it that Mother always had to rush away and “get dressed” at whatever hour of the day you brought in a visitor? Why couldn’t she _be_ dressed, like Aunt Lavvy? Why couldn’t she be found in the sitting-room, cool, silvery, and with that reposeful I-and-my-Maker look about her that auræd Aunt Lavvy? instead of invariably making a hurried entrance, a gasp of words beginning with, “Oh, my dear,” hands still red from recent washing, and that unfastened hook of her dress, three down from the collar-band, two up from the waist, betraying that she had dressed in too much of a hurry to summon help. And why did she wear dresses with trimming on them--half-inch trimming bought at the local draper’s by the yard, with tiny beads stitched on--two or three that hung by a thread? Aunt Lavvy, when strangers were introduced to her, always listened attentively to Nina’s preliminaries. And once having got them rightly placed in her clear mind, she gave them discriminate welcome, and appropriately shaded conversation. But Mother--she just made a general rule of being kind to anybody who was kind to any of her children, not just Nina or Hal, as it ought to have been--but _any_ of them! and then soused them in a wash of general conversation.... After the visit, Mrs. Mathers--or her prototype--would talk exclusively of Aunt Lavvy, how she reminded them of some one or something: “my own dear grandmother” or a miniature in the Wallace Collection, or a bit of porcelain; or a poem by “some man who always writes those sort of poems--let me see, now--who _is_ it?”