nobody came but Dr. Wilcove, Mr. Silva, the chore-man, and Becky States, the coloured washerwoman, who wore long glass earrings which she had abstracted from a broken lamp-shade in the parlour. Gritty Kestrell and Walter Dreer and Mark Laval didn't count, for they were children and never came indoors unless it was stormy. Paul was ill at ease when he brought them into the bare house, because it was so different from the noisy, cheerful interiors of other houses. Yet he secretly noted that when Aunt Verona sat them down to a table in the playroom and served them with milk and bread and butter and jam and cookies, there was a vague distinction about the occasion that subdued Gritty and reduced the elegant Walter to whispers—Walter whose mother made entrancing frosted walnut cakes!
If people knocked at the door Paul answered. Unless the caller were a tramp, a gipsy woman or a pedlar, it was his duty to say, "My aunt's not at home," though every one in Hale's Turning knew the contrary. At first, when he had protested against this fib, Aunt Verona had said, "Certain fibs have to be told, child, in the interest of truth as a whole. Little negatives are sometimes comprised in a positive total. You'll understand one day. Besides, in Milieux, where people are less literal-minded, it's simply a way of saying 'She doesn't wish to receive visitors to-day.'" She had seemed unusually serious and had sat looking out the playroom window, her eyes on some remote horizon of thought. Paul, drawing a picture of a locomotive on the blackboard, had kept as quiet as a mouse. Then, speaking to herself, Aunt Verona had blurted out, "God, what a labyrinth, labyrinth, labyrinth!"
Her cryptic manner and the strange word had abashed him, and he had put down his chalk preparing to steal away. With a start Aunt Verona had remembered his existence and fixed him with a stern eye, modified by
