at once, and had then to toil slowly through the
cake or pudding, and some valiantly dispatched the plainer portion of
the feast at the beginning, and kept the plums to sweeten the end.
Sooner or later we ate them ourselves, but Madam Liberality kept her
plums for other people.
When the vulgar meal was over--that commonplace refreshment ordained
and superintended by the elders of the household--Madam Liberality
would withdraw into a corner, from which she issued notes of
invitation to all the dolls. They were "fancy written" on curl papers
and folded into cocked hats.
Then began the real feast. The dolls came, and the children with them.
Madam Liberality had no toy tea-sets or dinner-sets, but there were
acorn-cups filled to the brim, and the water tasted deliciously,
though it came out of the ewer in the night nursery, and had not even
been filtered. And before every doll was a flat oyster-shell covered
with a round oyster-shell, a complete set of complete pairs, which had
been collected by degrees, like old family plate. And when the upper
shell was raised, on every dish lay a plum. It was then that Madam
Liberality got her sweetness out of the cake.
She was in her glory at the head of the inverted tea-chest; and if
the raisins would not go round, the empty oyster-shell was hers, and
nothing offended her more than to have this noticed. That was her
spirit, then and always. She could "do without" anything, if the
wherewithal to be hospitable was left to her.
When one's brain is no stronger than mine is, one gets very much
confused in disentangling motives and nice points of character. I have
doubted whether Madam Liberality's besetting virtue were a virtue at
all. Was it unselfishness or a love of approbation, benevolence or
fussiness, the gift of sympathy or the lust of power? Or was it
something else? She was a very sickly child, with much pain to bear,
and many pleasures to forego. Was it, as doctors say, "an effort of
nature," to make her live outside herself and be happy in the
happiness of others?
Equal doubt may hang over the conduct of her brothers and sister
towards her. Did they more love her, or find her useful? Was their
gratitude--as gratitude has been defined to be--"a keen sense of
favours to come"? They certainly got used to her services, and to
begging and borrowing the few things that were her "very own," without
fear of refusal. But if they rather took her benevolence for granted,
and tho
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