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Updated: May 18, 2025
"I'm afraid, Aunt Julia, I can't make up my mind as quickly as you wish. It isn't so simple as it seems. I'm not above a plan like this if I'm convinced it's necessary. But somehow.... Oh, I know what you're thinking you're thinking that beggars shouldn't be choosers. Well, I'm not quite a beggar yet. But when I am, I won't choose.... I'll promise you that." Mrs. Ffinch-Brown rose also.
Ffinch-Brown shook off Claire impatiently. "Hired you!" she sneered. "How extraordinary!" And with that she swept past, giving Stillman a glance of farewell. Claire turned to Stillman. "What must you think of me? Leaving my flowers behind. Confess it was you who sent them.... I was in such a rush to get away, though. I shouldn't have stayed so long.
I could wreck her reputation like that," she snapped her fingers, "with one solitary fact. If she hasn't wrecked it already with her senseless chatter.... Only last week her aunt, Mrs. Ffinch-Brown, said to me: 'So you're hiring my niece! I must say that is handsome of you! You were sitting talking to Claire and she looked deliberately at you when she said it.
Doubtless a time was coming when she would find it necessary to use this money, but the present moment was too charged with the giver's resentful benevolence to make such a compromise possible. For three consecutive days Mrs. Ffinch-Brown swooped down upon the Robson household and gave vent to her pique.
"I've been talking to Miss Morton ... about your mother," Mrs. Ffinch-Brown began, without bothering to lead up to the subject. "You know Alice Morton.... Well, your mother does, anyway. I bumped into her yesterday, quite by accident ... at a Red Cross meeting. It seems she's one of the directors of The King's Daughters' Home for Incurables!"
Claire could almost fancy how conspicuously she had contrived to carry this overworked badge of the humanities, and the languid drawl of her voice as she explained to her friends en route: "So sorry I can't stop and chat. But, as you see, I'm running along to a sick-room.... Oh no, nothing serious, I hope! Just my sister.... Mrs. Ffinch-Brown? Oh, dear no! A younger sister.
I'll keep them for her until she is twenty. I nearly cried myself sick, but of course mother was right, then.... But like everything else, I never got my hands on them again. And what is more, Julia Carrol Ffinch-Brown knows that they are mine as well as anybody, because she stood right alongside of me when I handed them over to mother. Not that I care.... It's the principle of the thing!"
But her selfishness had at least the virtue of a live-and-let-live attitude that contrasted with the futile aggressiveness of Mrs. Edward Ffinch-Brown. She asked Claire no questions concerning her life or her prospects; she did not even pry very deeply into the chances that her sister had for an ultimate recovery.
"I was on the program," she returned, consciously eying the turquoise pendants. Mrs. Ffinch-Brown rested a closed fan against her left ear as if to screen at least one of the earrings from Claire's frank stare. "Oh, how interesting! I must have missed you I came in late. It's rather odd. I thought I knew everybody on the program.... I helped arrange it."
Claire was sitting opposite her aunt, nervously fingering a paper-cutter. Mrs. Ffinch-Brown eyed her niece sharply, and with an obvious determination to drive her thrusts home before her victim recovered from the first vicious stabs she continued: "It seems they haven't a great deal of room out there, but she thinks she could arrange things.
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