The day-nursery, afterward the school-room, was over the dining-room, and the bedrooms were at the back of the house.
The Carmichaels were of an ancient and impoverished family, their estates, shrunken as they were, only kept together by careful economy, but there was no touch of dreariness in Eppie’s home. She was a happy child, filling her life with imaginative pastimes and finding on every side objects for her vigorous affections. Her aunts’ mild disciplines weighed lightly on her. Love and discipline were sundered principles in the grandmotherly administration, and Eppie soon learned that the formalities of the first were easily evaded and to weigh the force of her own naughtiness against it. Corporal punishment formed part of the Misses Carmichael’s conception of discipline, but though, on the rare occasions when it could not be escaped, Eppie bawled heart-rendingly during the very tremulous application, it was with little disturbance of spirit that she endured the reward of transgression.
At an early age she understood very clearly the simple characters around her. Aunt Rachel and Aunt Barbara were both placid, both pious, both full of unsophisticated good works, both serenely acquiescent in their lots. In Aunt Barbara, indeed, placidity was touched with wistfulness; she was the gentler, the more yielding of the two. Aunt Rachel could be inspired with the greater ruthlessness of conscientious conviction. It was she who insisted upon the letter of the law in regard to the Sunday collect, the Sunday church-going, who mingled reproof with her village charities, who could criticize with such decision the short-comings, doctrinal and domestic, of Mr. MacNab, minister of the little established church that stood near the village. Aunt Barbara was far less assured of the forms of things; she seemed to search and fumble a little for further, fuller outlets, and yet to have found a greater serenity. Aunt Rachel was fond of pointing out to her niece such facts of geology, botany, and natural history in general as the country life and her own somewhat rudimentary knowledge suggested to her as useful; Aunt Barbara, on the contrary, told pretty, allegorical tales about birds and flowers--tales with a heavy cargo of moral insinuation, to which, it must be confessed, Eppie listened with an inner sense of stubborn realism. It was Aunt Barbara who sought to impress upon her that the inclusive attribute of Deity was love, and who, when Eppie asked her where God was, answered, “In your heart, dear child.” Eppie was much puzzled by anatomical considerations in reflecting upon this information. Aunt Rachel, with clear-cut, objective facts from Genesis, was less mystifying to inquisitive, but pagan childhood. Eppie could not help thinking of God as somewhat like austere, gray-bearded old James, the gardener, whose vocation suggested that pictorial chapter in the Bible, and who, when he found her one day eating unripe fruit, warned her with such severity of painful retribution.
