"
They retraced their steps past the mournful Miss Peters and through the
vast state bedroom. On the stairs Mrs. Bates said:
"I _do_ remember your aunt, Mrs. Rhodes, now," The conscientious creature
had been taxing her memory for an hour. Jane felt that this was a
tribute, not to her aunt, but to herself.
"Yes," Mrs. Bates went on, "she's a little, plump, dark woman, and when
she sits down she wiggles and flounces and goes all in a heap--like
this." Mrs. Bates illustrated by means of the window-seat on the landing.
"Yes," assented Jane. She could not reproach Mrs. Bates for thus
indulging her sense of humor in order to recoup herself for the tax on
her memory.
"And when she goes down-stairs, it's like this." She gathered up her gown
and sidled down affectedly over the remaining steps.
"That's it," said Jane, joining her in the hall below.
Mrs. Bates opened the front door herself. "You can take the choo-choo
cars at Sixteenth, you know, and get off at Van Buren. Oh, dear; excuse
my baby-talk; our little Reginald--two months old, you know. I'll have
Lottie home for that lunch of ours."
"Don't apologize," said Jane. "I often use the same expression myself."
"Why, is there a baby at your house!"
"Well," said Jane, rather lamely, "Alice has got a little girl three
years old."
"So David Marshall is a grandfather? But what is there extraordinary in
that?--I'm one myself." She stood in the big porch looking down the
street--at nothing.
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