“Bartie’s wife leaves him, and we help Bartie by taking care of his child—­who is our niece, not yours.”

“My dear Frances, that attitude isn’t going to deceive anybody.  If you don’t think of Anthony and your children, you might think of us.  We don’t want to be mixed up in this perfectly horrible affair.”

“How are you mixed up in it?”

“Well, after all, Frances, we are the family.  We are your sisters and your mother and your children’s grand-mother and aunts.”

“Then,” said Frances with decision, “you must try to bear it.  You must take the rough with the smooth, as Anthony and I do.”

And as soon as she had said it she was sorry.  It struck her for the first time that her sisters were getting old.  It was no use for Auntie Louie, more red and more rigid than ever, to defy the imminence of her forty-ninth birthday.  Auntie Emmy’s gestures, her mouthings and excitement, only drew attention to the fact that she was forty-seven.  And Edie, why, even poor little Auntie Edie was forty-five.  Grannie, dry and wiry, hardly looked older than Auntie Edie.

They left her, going stiffly, in offence.  And again the unbearable pathos of them smote her.  The poor Aunties.  She was a brute to hurt them.  She still thought of them as Auntie Louie, Auntie Emmy, Auntie Edie.  It seemed kinder; for thus she bestowed upon them a colour and vitality that, but for her and for her children, they would not have had.  They were helpless, tiresome, utterly inefficient.  In all their lives they had never done anything vigorous or memorable.  They were doomed to go out before her children; when they were gone they would be gone altogether.  Neither Auntie Louie, nor Auntie Emmy, nor Auntie Edie would leave any mark or sign of herself.  But her children gave them titles by which they would be remembered after they were gone.  It was as if she had bestowed on them a little of her own enduring life.

It was absurd and pathetic that they should think that they were the Family.

But however sorry she was for them she could not allow them to dictate to her in matters that concerned her and Anthony alone.  If they were so worried, about the scandal, why hadn’t they the sense to see that the only way to meet it was to give it the lie by taking Ronny, by behaving as if Ronny were unquestionably Bartie’s daughter and their niece?  They were bound to do it, if not for Vera’s sake, for the dear little girl’s sake.  And that was what Vera had been thinking of; that was why she had trusted them.

But her three sisters had always disliked Vera.  They disliked her because, while they went unmarried, Vera, not content with the one man who was her just and legal portion, had taken another man whom she had no right to.  And Auntie Emmeline had been in love with Ferdie.