Mrs. Ffinch-Brown’s visit was scarcely more comforting, but decidedly more exciting.  She had not the suavity of her indifferences.  Mrs. Robson’s untimely tilt with fate irritated her, and she took no pains to conceal this fact.

“I suppose your mother is just as she’s always been—­a creature of nerves,” she said, as she dropped into a seat for a preliminary session with Claire before venturing upon the unwelcome sight of her stricken sister.  “I don’t know why it is, but she seems to be one of those people who always has had something the matter with her.  Poor Emily!  Well, I suppose we are all made differently.”

When she entered the sick-room she found fault with the arrangement of the bed, the manner in which the covers slipped off, the uncovered glass of medicine on the bureau.

“You should braid your mother’s hair, too.  And why don’t you pull the window down from the top?”

Claire stood in sullen silence while her aunt vented a personal annoyance on the nearest objects.  But when Mrs. Ffinch-Brown’s ill-natured ministrations brought a dumb but protesting misery to the sufferer’s face, Claire found the courage to say, as gently as she could: 

“Why bother, Aunt Julia?  Mother is really too sick now to care much about appearances?”

This was just what Claire’s aunt had hoped for.  It gave her a chance for escape without any strain upon her conscience.  She did not remain long after what she was pleased to consider a rebuff.

“Well, Claire, I see I can’t be of much help,” she announced as she powdered her nose before the shabby hat-rack mirror and drew on her gloves....  After she was gone Claire found a five-dollar bill on the living-room table.  She opened the gilt-edged copy of Tennyson that, together with a calf edition of Ouida’s Moths, had stood for years as guard over the literary pretensions of the household, and thrust the money midway between its covers.  Doubtless a time was coming when she would find it necessary to use this money, but the present moment was too charged with the giver’s resentful benevolence to make such a compromise possible.

For three consecutive days Mrs. Ffinch-Brown swooped down upon the Robson household and gave vent to her pique.  She had been divorced so long from these melancholy relations of hers that she had really forgotten their existence, and she displayed all the rancor of a woman who discovers suddenly a moth hole in the long undisturbed folds of a treasured cashmere shawl.  Her precisely timed visits had not the slightest suspicion of attentiveness back of them, and Claire guessed almost at once that they were more in the nature of assaults carried on in the hope that she would meet enough opposition to insure an honorable retreat.  Unlike Mrs. Thomas Wynne, Aunt Julia inquired minutely into family matters, insisted on knowing Claire’s plans, and was aggressively free with advice.

“You ought to be making plans, Claire,” she said, at the conclusion of her second visit.  “You can’t go on like this.  I’d like to be able to do more, but of course I can’t spare much time.  And next week you’ll have to be getting into harness again.  You’d better think it over.”