Dearest Mamma,—­I can’t think why you made me come here!  Agnes has been so sniffy and condescending ever since this morning; but I have remarked that Uncle John’s valet is only about forty and has a roving eye! so perhaps by to-morrow morning I shan’t have my hair screwed off my head!  But I feel for Agnes, only in a different way.

[Sidenote:  A Quiet Evening]

It is a stuffy, boring place.  You remember the house—­enormous, tidy, hideous, uncomfortable.  Well, we had such a dinner last night after I arrived—­soup, fish, everything popped on to the table for Great-uncle John to carve at one end, and Great-aunt Maria at the other!  A regular aquarium specimen of turbot sat on its dish opposite him, while Aunt Maria had a huge lot of soles.  And there wasn’t any need, because there were four men-servants in the room who could easily have done it at the side; but I remember you said it was always like that when you were a little girl.  Well, it got on to puddings.  I forgot to tell you, though, there were plenty of candles on the table, without shades, and a “bouquet” of flowers, all sorts (I am sure fixed in sand), in a gold middle thing.  Well, about the puddings—­at least four of them were planted on the table, awfully sweet and jammy, and Uncle John was quite irritated with me because I could only eat two; and Aunt Maria, who has got as deaf as a post, kept roaring to old Major Orwell, who sat next her, “Children have no healthy appetites as in our day.  Eh! what?” And I wanted to scream in reply, “But I am grown up now, Aunt Maria!”

Uncle John asked me every question over and over, and old Lady Farrington’s false teeth jumped so once or twice that I got quite nervous.  That is the party, me, Major Orwell, Lady Farrington, and Uncle and Aunt.

When dessert was about coming, everything thing got lifted from the table, and before you could say “Jack Robinson” off whisked the cloth.  I was so unprepared for it that I said “Oh!” and ducked my head, and that made the cloth catch on old Lady Farrington’s cap—­she had to sit on my side of the table, to be out of the draught—­and, wasn’t it dreadful, it almost pulled it off, and with it the grey curls fixed at the side, and the rest was all bald.  So that was why it was so loose—­there was nothing to pin it to!  And she glared at me, and fixed it as straight as she could, but it had such a saucy look all the rest of the evening.

I did apologise as well as I could, and there was such an awkward pause; and after dinner we had coffee in the drawing-room, and then in a little time tea, and between times they sat down to whist, all but Aunt Maria—­so they had to have a dummy.  She wanted to hear all about you, she said, and my going to visit in France; and so I had to bellow descriptions of your neuralgia, and about Mme. de Croixmare being my godmother, &c., and Aunt Maria says, “Tut, tut!” as well as “Eh! what?” to everything.  I had not remembered a bit what they were like; but I was only six, wasn’t I, when we came last?