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No during those first two years the only pleasures, so memory declared, were three: the visits of the cake-woman on Saturday Marcella sitting in her window could still taste the three-cornered puffs and small sweet pears on which, as much from a fierce sense of freedom and self-assertion as anything else, she had lavished her tiny weekly allowance; the mad games of "tig," which she led and organised in the top playground; and the kindnesses of fat Mademoiselle Rénier, Miss Frederick's partner, who saw a likeness in Marcella to a long-dead small sister of her own, and surreptitiously indulged "the little wild-cat," as the school generally dubbed the Speaker's great-niece, whenever she could.
And when the men he had frightened so badly learned that Bobby was a castaway and a very real person and not a ghost at all, they vied with one another in showering kindnesses upon him, for these men of the fleets, though a bit rough, and a bit superstitious at times, have big brave hearts, filled with sympathy for their kind.
For they who have received kindnesses frequently plead in depreciation that they have received from their benefactors such things as were small for them to give, or such as they themselves could have got from others: while the doers of the kindnesses affirm that they gave the best they had, and what could not have been got from others, and under danger, or in such-like straits.
"I'll run the risk," he said. "She is my guest, you know, and, as such, will surely be given every consideration and courtesy by all." "Oh, certainly," said Barbara, seeing that she had gone, perhaps, too far. "If you wish it. I should be glad to please you, once again." "Nothing could please me more than to have you show her what kindnesses you can. I know she will feel strange and worried."
Besides this, Madame d'Avrigny begged her to come and dine with her, when there would be only themselves, on Mondays, and then practise with Dolly, who had not another moment in which she could take a lesson. She should be sent home scrupulously before ten o'clock, that being the hour at the convent when every one must be in. Jacqueline accepted all these kindnesses gratefully.
Perhaps it was the excitement of the time and stirring memories, but, for whatever reason, it seemed to her that her "folks" were all about her, strengthening her to the kindnesses and the loyalties of life. She was not in the habit of praying; but as she lay upon the lounge in the kitchen, between waking and sleep, she kept saying to some hidden power: "You look out for him.
He paused again, and his face assumed the expression of an attentive listener. "What!" he then exclaimed in a loud voice, "you say my family will leave me, and betray me in adversity? No, that is impossible, I have lavished kindnesses on them, I " He paused, and seemed to listen again. "Ah," he exclaimed, after a short interval, starting violently, "that is too much!
She is partial to the everyday married lady, when presentable in point of dress and manners, and overwhelms her with little condescending kindnesses and caresses. This good lady, on her part, thinks her patroness a remarkably clever woman; not that she understands her, or knows exactly what she is about; but somehow or other she is sure she is prodigiously clever.
They made my short stay doubly happy by endless kindnesses; and all through the years, till his death in 1918, Mr. Stirling gave me not only a friendship which meant more to me than I can express, but his loving and invaluable aid and counsel in our work.
Indeed, she never could think of the Browns without talking Johnson; and, as they were seldom absent from her thoughts just then, I heard many a rolling, three-piled sentence. Captain Brown called one day to thank Mist Jenkyns for many little kindnesses, which I did not know until then that she had rendered.
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