knows that pigs are things that get prizes.
She still clings to her childish belief that streaky bacon comes from
feeding the pigs one day and not the next.

Every one, like Mrs. Blankley, had a thirst to see something, and I
was left alone with Aunt Anna, to discuss Pauline's wedding. As a
rule, there is nothing Aunt Anna would sooner discuss, but I saw that
something was worrying her, and I guessed that the unburdening of a
rarely perturbed mind was imminent. It was.

"Is anything wrong?--" I asked. "Any of the children worrying you?" She
nodded and pointed to a diamond and ruby brooch and said plaintively.
"This one, Claud, just a little worrying."

I tried to hide a smile. "Oh, that's Claud, is it? I get a little
mixed."

"I dare say, dear," she said; "but it's quite simple, really. Jack was
the tiara, and so on."

"What has Claud been doing?" I asked. "Oh, nothing he can help, I feel
sure. He has a temperament, I believe. What it is I don't quite know;
people grow out of it, I am told. It's not so much doing things as
saying them; and his friends are odd, decidedly odd. They wear curious
ties, have disheveled hair, and are distinctly decollete. I don't know
if I should apply the word to men, but they are."

I suggested that these little indiscretions on the part of extreme youth
need not worry her. But she said they did, in a way, because her
other children were so very plain sailing. They never took any one by
surprise. She then told me of poor Lady Adelaide, a near neighbor, at
least as near as it was possible for any neighbor to be, considering
the extent of the Manwell property, one of whose boys had written a book
without her knowledge, and the other had married under exactly similar
conditions.

I said I thought the writing of a book a minor offense compared to
the matrimonial venture. She agreed, but said they were both upsetting
because unexpected. As an instance, did I remember when Lady Victoria
was butted by her pet lamb, when she was showing the Prince her white
farm? It wasn't the upsetting she minded, so much as the unexpectedness
of it, because the lamb had a blue ribbon round its neck!

"A black sheep in a white farm, Aunt Anna!" I said.

"No, dear, it was white, and it was a lamb."

But to return to Lady Adelaide. Now that Aunt Anna came to think of it,
the marriage was the better of the two shocks, because financially it
was a success, and the book wasn't. "Books aren't," She added.