‘The Miss Hacket were sister or daughters or something to some old man who used to be clergyman here, and they are all married up but these two, and they’ve got the dearest little house you ever saw. They had a nephew in the 111th, and so they came and called on us at once. Miss Hacket is a regular old dear, but we none of us can bear Miss Constance, except that mamma says we ought to be sorry for her because she leads such a confined life. Miss Hacket and Aunt Jane always do go on so about the G.F.S. They both are branch secretaries, you know.’ ‘I know! Aunt Jane did bother Mrs. Sefton so that she says she will never have another of those G.F.S. girls. She says it is a society for interference.’ ‘Mamma likes it,’ said Mysie. ‘Oh! but she is only just come.’ ‘Yes; but she always looked after the school children at Beechcroft before she married, and she and Alethea and Phyllis had the soldiers’ children up on Sunday. Alethea taught the little drummer boys, and they were so funny. I wonder who teaches them now! Gill always goes down to help Miss Hacket with her G.F.S. classes. She has one on Sunday afternoon, and one on Tuesday for sewing, and she is the only young lady in the place who can do plain needlework properly.’ ‘Sewing-machines can work. What the use of fussing about it!’ ‘They can’t mend,’ said Mysie. ‘Besides, do you know, in the American war, all the sewing-machines in the Southern States got out of order, and as all the machinery people were in the north, the poor ladies didn’t know what to do, and couldn’t work without them.’ ‘Sewing-machines are a recent invention,’ said Dolores. ‘Oh! you didn’t think I meant the great old War of Independence. No, I meant the war about the slaves--secession they called it.’ ‘That is not in the history of England,’ said Dolores, as if Mysie had no business to look beyond. ‘Why! of course not, when it happened in America. Papa told us about it. He read it in some paper, I think. Don’t you like learning things in that way?’ ‘No. I don’t approve of irregular unsystematic knowledge.’ Dolores has heard her mother say something of this kind, and it came into her head most opportunely as a defence of her father--for she would not for the world have confessed that he did not talk to her as Sir Jasper Merrifield seemed to have done to his children. In fact she rather despised the General for so doing. ‘Oh! but it is such fun picking up things out of lesson time!’ said Mysie. ‘That is the Edge--,’ Dolores was not sure of the word Edgeworthian, so she went on to ‘system. Professor Sefton says he does not approve of harassing children with cramming them with irregular information at all sorts of times. Let play be play and lessons be lessons, he says, not mixed up together, and so Rex and Maude never learnt anything--not a letter--till they were seven years old.’ ‘How stupid!’ cried Mysie. ‘Maude’s not stupid!’ cried Dolores, ‘nor the professor either! She’s my great friend.’