So Ailie had gone reluctant to the Misses Duff and told them that on the morrow the child would start in their academy. They currookity-cooed at the prospect, put past their crocheting, brought out their celebrated silver spoons, and made of the afternoon tea a banquet with the aid of a seed-cake hurriedly brought from P. & A. MacGlashan’s. Their home was like a stall in a bazaar and smelt of turpentine. Ailie, who loved wide spaces, sat cramped between a laden what-not and a white-enamelled spinning-wheel, the feathers of her hat colliding with a fretwork bracket on the wall behind her chair, and thinking not unkindly of the creatures, wished that she could give them a good shaking. Oh! they were so prim, pernickety, and hopelessly in all things wrong! She was not very large herself, for stature, but in their company she felt gigantic. And oddly there rose in her, too, a sense of gladness that she was of a newer kind of women than those gentle slaves, prisoned in their primness, manacled by stupid old conceits. She was glad she was free, that her happy hours were not so wasted in futilities, that she saw farther, that she knew no social fears, that custom had not crushed her soul, and yet she someway liked and pitied them.
“You’ll find her somewhat odd,” she explained as she nibbled the seed-cake, with a silly little d’oyley of Miss Jean’s contrivance on her knee, and the doves fluttering round her as timid of settling down as though they had actual feathers and she were a cat. “She has got a remarkably quick intelligence; she is quite unconventional,—quite unlike other children in many respects, and it may be difficult at first to manage her.”
“Dear me!” said Miss Jean. “What a pity she should be so odd! I suppose it’s the American system; but perhaps she will improve.”
“Oh, it’s nothing alarming,” explained Miss Ailie, recovering the d’oyley from the floor to which it had slid from her knee, and replacing it with a wicked little shake. “If she didn’t speak much you would never guess from her appearance that she knew any more than—than most of us. Her mother, I feel sure, was something of a genius—at least it never came from the Dyce side; we were all plain folk, not exactly fools, but still not odd enough to have the dogs bite us, or our neighbours cross to the other side of the street when they saw us coming. She died two years ago, and when William—when my brother died, Lennox was staying with professional friends of himself and his wife, who have been good enough to let us have her, much against their natural inclination.”