neither
does----"

Here the editor came in.

"You don't want to be sentimental either," Kitty went on; "do you--Mr
Editor?"

The editor looked a little doubtful.

"I want to be happy, at any rate," said he, "and I mean to be."

"And he can't be happy unless you smile on him. Smile on him, Auntie!"
cried a new, radiant Kitty, to whom aunts no longer presented any
terrors. "Say 'Bless you, my children!' Auntie--do!"

"Get along with your nonsense!" said Aunt Eliza. Or was it Aunt Kate?

VIII

MISS MOUSE

They were poor, not with the desperate poverty that has to look on both
sides of a penny, but with the decent bearable poverty that must look at
a shilling with attention, and with respect at half-a-crown. There was
money for the necessities of life, the mother said, but no money to
waste. This was what she always tried to say when Maisie came in with
rainbow representations of the glories of local "sales" piteous pictures
of beautiful things going almost for nothing--things not absolutely
needed, but which would "come in useful." Maisie's dress was never
allowed those touches of cheap finery which would have made it
characteristic of her. Her clothes were good, and she had to patch and
mend and contrive so much that sometimes it seemed to her as though all
her life was going by in the effort to achieve, by a distasteful
process, a result which she abhorred. For her artistic sense was too
weak to show her how the bright, soft freshness of her tints gained by
contrast with the dull greys and browns and drabs that were her mother's
choice--good wearing colours, from which the pink and white of her face
rose triumphantly, like a beautiful flower out of a rough calyx.

The house was like Maisie, in that it never seemed to have anything
new--none of those bright, picturesque cushions and screens and
Japaneseries which she adored through the plate-glass windows of the big
local draper. The curtains were of old damask, faded but rich; the
furniture was mahogany, old and solid; the carpets were Turkey and
Aubusson--patched and darned this last, but still beautiful. Maisie knew
all about old oak--she had read her _Home Hints_ and her _Gentlewoman's
Guide_--but she had no idea that mahogany could be fashionable. None of
the photographs of the drawing-rooms of celebrities in her favourite
papers were anything like the little sitting-room where her mother sat
knitting by the hearth, surrounded by the relics of a