Henry and Caroline glanced at each other in horror. Mr. Arbuthnot said: “How very interesting! But I really don’t think I am likely to do such a thing.” Laura made no answer. She did not think so either. But she was amusing herself with a surprisingly vivid and terrible picture of Mr. Arbuthnot cloaked in a shaggy hide and going with heavy devouring swiftness upon all-fours with a lamb dangling from his mouth.
This settled it. Henry and Caroline made no more attempts to marry off Laura. Trying to do so had been a nuisance and an expense, and Laura had never shown the smallest appreciation of their trouble. Before long they would have the girls to think of. Fancy was sixteen, and Marion nearly as tall as Fancy. In two years they would have to begin again. They were glad of a respite, and made the most of it. Laura also was glad of a respite. She bought secondhand copies of Herodotus and Johnson’s Dictionary to read in the evenings. Caroline, still sewing on buttons, would look at her sister-in-law’s composed profile. Laura’s hair was black as ever, but it was not so thick. She had grown paler from living in London. Her forehead had not a wrinkle, but two downward lines prolonged the drooping corners of her mouth. Her face was beginning to stiffen. It had lost its power of expressiveness, and was more and more dominated by the hook nose and the sharp chin. When Laura was ten years older she would be nut-crackerish.
Caroline resigned herself to spending the rest of her evenings with Laura beside her. The perpetual company of a sister-in-law was rather more than she had bargained for. Still, there she was, and Henry was right—they had been the proper people to make a home for Laura when her father died, and she was too old now to begin living by herself. It was not as if she had had any experience of life; she had passed from one guardianship to another: it was impossible to imagine Laura fending for herself. A kind of pity for the unused virgin beside her spread through Caroline’s thoughts. She did not attach an inordinate value to her wifehood and maternity; they were her duties, rather than her glories. But for all that she felt emotionally plumper than Laura. It was well to be loved, to be necessary to other people. But Laura too was loved, and Laura was necessary. Caroline did not know what the children would do without their Aunt Lolly.
Everyone spoke of her as Aunt Lolly, till in the course of time she had almost forgotten her baptismal name.
“Say How-do to Auntie Laura,” said Caroline to Fancy. This was long ago in the refurbished nursery at Lady Place when Laura knelt timidly before her first niece, while the London nurse bustled round them unpacking soft hairbrushes and pots of cold cream, and hanging linen to air upon the tall nursery fender.
“How-do, Auntie Lolly,” said Fancy, graciously thrusting forward a fur monkey.
“She’s taken to you at once, Laura,” said Caroline. “I was afraid this journey would upset her, but she’s borne it better than any of us.”
“Journeys are nothing to them at that age, ma’am,” said the nurse. “Now suppose you tell your new auntie what you call Monkey.”
“Auntie Lolly, Auntie Lolly,” repeated Fancy, rhythmically banging the monkey against the table-leg.
The name hit upon by Fancy was accepted by Marion and Titus; before long their parents made use of it also. Everard never spoke of his daughter but as Laura, even when he spoke of her to his grandchildren. He was too old to change his ways, and he had, in any case, a prejudice against nicknames and abbreviations. But when Laura went to London she left Laura behind, and entered into a state of Aunt Lolly. She had quitted so much of herself in quitting Somerset that it seemed natural to relinquish her name also. Divested of her easily-worn honours as mistress of the household, shorn of her long meandering country days, sleeping in a smart brass bedstead instead of her old and rather pompous four-poster, wearing unaccustomed clothes and performing unaccustomed duties, she seemed to herself to have become a different person. Or rather, she had become two persons, each different. One was Aunt Lolly, a middle-aging lady, light-footed upon stairs, and indispensable for Christmas Eve and birthday preparations. The other was Miss Willowes, “my sister-in-law Miss Willowes,” whom Caroline would introduce, and abandon to a feeling of being neither light-footed nor indispensable. But Laura was put away. When Henry asked her to witness some document for him her Laura Erminia Willowes seemed as much a thing out of common speech as the Spinster that followed it. She would look, and be surprised that such a dignified name should belong to her.
Twice a year, in spring and in summer, the Willowes family went into the country for a holiday. For the first three years of Laura’s London life they went as a matter of course to Lady Place. There once more arose the problem of how two children of one sex can play nicely with a much younger child of the other. Fancy and Marion played at tea-parties under the weeping ash, and Titus was the butler with a tin tray, Titus would presently run off and play by himself at soldiers, beating martial tattoos upon the tray. But now there was no danger of the youngest member of the party falling into the pond, for Aunt Lolly was always on guard.
Laura enjoyed the visits to Lady Place, but her enjoyment did not go very deep. The knowledge that she now was a visitor where she had formerly been at home seemed to
