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PART I
When the world’s asleep,
I awake and weep,
Deeply sighing, say,
“Come, O break of day,
Lead my feet in my beloved’s way.”

MARGARET L. WOODS.

When first I knew Aunt Emmy I suppose she was about twenty-eight. I was ten, and I thought her old, but still an agreeable companion, infinitely pleasanter than her father and her brother, with whom she lived. She was not my real aunt, but her father was my great-uncle, and I always called her Aunt Emmy. Great-uncle Thomas and Uncle Tom were persons to be avoided, stout, heavy, bullet-headed, bull-necked, throat-clearing men, loud nose-blowers, loud soup-eaters, who reeked of tobacco when it was my horrid duty to kiss them, and who addressed me in jocular terms when they remembered my existence, of which I was always loth to remind them. With these two horrors, whom she loved, Aunt Emmy lived. She was wrapped up in them. I have actually seen her kiss Uncle Thomas when it was not necessary, when he was asleep; and she admired Uncle Tom very much too, though she seldom kissed him, I believe by his wish. He used to say something about sister’s kisses being like cold veal. I don’t suppose he invented that himself. He was always picking up things like that out of a rose-coloured paper, and firing them off as his own. Uncle Tom was tall and portly, and a wag out of office hours, with a moustache that, in spite of all his efforts, would not turn up, but insisted on making a melancholy inner semicircle just a size smaller than the rubicund circle of his face. How I hated kindly, vulgar Uncle Tom! I used to pray that he might die before the holidays. But he never did. I see now that Uncle Tom was far, far worse than Uncle Thomas, who had had a stroke, and was a kind of furious invalid who could not speak clearly, or eat anything except things that were bad for him. But when I was a child, and first began to spend my holidays in Pembridge Square, I regarded them both with the same repulsion.

Aunt Emmy was different. I know now that she must have been a remarkably pretty woman, but I did not notice that at the time. But a faint, indefinable fragrance seemed to envelop her. I loved to stroke her soft white hand, and to turn the emerald ring on her third finger, and to lean against her soft shoulder. Aunt Emmy’s cheek was very soft too, and so was her full, silky hair, which she wore parted all her life, though it was never the fashion to do so that I can remember, though I am told it is now the dernier cri among the debutantes. Aunt Emmy had a beautifully shaped head, and the whitest brow and neck that I have ever seen. And she had a low voice, and was very dignified. I do not think that she was a very wise woman, or that she had ever wrestled with the deeper problems of life, or that the mystery of pain had ever caused her faith to totter. But she was very good to live with. She devoted herself.

She never had her own way in anything that I can remember. The house never represented her. The furniture was leathern and velvet and stout-looking, the kind of furniture which seems to aim at being more or less exact moulds of the forms of middle-aged men. The armchairs were like commodious hip-baths in plush. Aunt Emmy and I were lost in them. I remember once walking as a child through the wilderness of armchairs at Maple’s and thinking they all looked like Uncle Tom. A good deal of Utrecht velvet had gone to the upholstering of that house in Pembridge Square. It was comfortable, airless, flowerless, with gravy-coloured walls. As I grew older I wondered why it was all so ugly and dreary. But I found there were less means than I had supposed, and though the cooking remained excellent, flowers and new chintzes were dispensed with as unnecessary. Aunt Emmy opened a window surreptitiously now and then, but Uncle Thomas and Uncle Tom hated draughts, and they did not get off to sleep so quickly after dinner if the drawing-room had been aired during the meal. The dining-room windows were never opened at all, except when Uncle Thomas was too unwell to come in and Uncle Tom was away.