There were the seven girls, there
was the strained mother, there was the worried father at whom,
three times in the course of that year, the tenants took pot-shots
from behind a hedge. The women-folk, upon the whole, the
tenants respected. Once a week each of the girls, since there were
seven of them, took a drive with the mother in the old basketwork
chaise drawn by a very fat, very lumbering pony. They paid
occasionally a call, but even these were so rare that, Leonora has
assured me, only three times in the year that succeeded her
coming home from the convent did she enter another person's
house. For the rest of the time the seven sisters ran about in the
neglected gardens between the unpruned espaliers. Or they played
lawn-tennis or fives in an angle of a great wall that surrounded the
garden--an angle from which the fruit trees had long died away.
They painted in water-colour; they embroidered; they copied
verses into albums. Once a week they went to Mass; once a week
to the confessional, accompanied by an old nurse. They were
happy since they had known no other life.
It appeared to them a singular extravagance when, one day, a
photographer was brought over from the county town and
photographed them standing, all seven, in the shadow of an old
apple tree with the grey lichen on the raddled trunk.
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