So perfect, yet so partially perfect, that mankind could
only break them all to pieces and start again. But Alice, tidy little
soul, loves the fine order of it all. If they embroidered flowers so
well, they must, she thinks, have loved the very flowers, too, and such
good manners must have meant that somewhere underneath the silk and
stays they had kind and worthy souls. But her mouth does droop a
little, and she asks her uncle, almost whispering:
"Do you think they understood it?"
"Any child could understand it," Uncle Edward says, and back to his
paper he goes.
Alice gives a shy glance round. She doesn't mind now if they do hear.
"But that's the trouble, as poor Auntie used to say: 'They're not
children.' Don't we only wish they were."
Once more, then, Uncle Edward sizes up the house; a good house now, a
contented house, a bread-and-butter house not to be quarrelled with.
"You take your public as you find 'em, my Missie," he says, or rather,
this he only seems to say.
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