They were interrupted the next minute, and Janet ran away, feeling
that she had had an escape, yet wishing she had not.
Caroline did effectually shelter her nephews under her general term
"the boys," and if their mother was not conciliated, their fellow-
feeling with her was strengthened, as well as their sense of honour.
Nay, Johnny actually spent the next half-holiday in walking three
miles and back to his old nurse, whom he beguiled out of a basket of
plums-—hard, little blue things, as unlike magnum bonums as could
well be, but which his aunt received as they were meant, as full
compensation; nay, she took the pains to hunt up a recipe, and have
them well preserved, in hopes of amazing his mother.
It was indeed one difficulty that the two sisters-in-law had such
different notions of the aim and end of economy. The income at
Kencroft had not increased with the family, which numbered eight, for
there were two little boys in the nursery, and it was only by
diligent housewifery that Mrs. Brownlow kept up the somewhat handsome
establishment she had started with at her marriage. Caroline felt
that she neither could nor would have made herself such a slave to
domestic details; yet this was life and duty and interest to Ellen.
Where one sister would be unheeding of shabby externals, so that all
her children might be free and on an equality, if they did not go
beyond her, in all enjoyments, physical, artistic, or intellectual;
the other toiled to keep up appearances, kept her children under
restraint and in the background, and made all sorts of unseen
sacrifices to the supposed duty of always having a handsome dinner
for whomsoever the Colonel might bring in, and keeping the horses,
carriages, and servants that she thought his due.
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