“Now, Susan,” cried Mrs. Price, in a complaining voice, “now, how can you be so cross? You are always quarrelling about that knife. Poor little Betsey; how cross Susan is to you! But you should not have taken it out, my dear, when I sent you to the drawer. You know I told you not to touch it, because Susan is so cross about it. I must hide it again, Betsey. Poor Mary little thought it would be such a bone of contention when she gave it me to keep, only two hours before she died. Poor little soul! she could barely speak, and she said so prettily, ‘Let sister Susan have my knife, mama, when I am dead and buried.’ Poor little dear! she was so fond of it, Fanny, that she would have it lay by her in bed, all through her illness. It was the gift of her good godmother, old Mrs. Admiral Maxwell, only six weeks before she was taken for death. Poor little sweet creature! Well, she was taken away from evil to come. My own Betsey” (fondling her), “you have not the luck of such a good godmother. Aunt Norris lives too far off to think of such little people as you.”

The last thing aunt Norris, a werewolf, would be gifting is a thing of silver, Fanny thought. For that matter, a non-lupine aunt Norris were equally unlikely to give away silver, due to an even more dire condition called frugality.

Fanny had indeed nothing to convey from aunt Norris, but a message to say she hoped that her god-daughter was a good girl, and learnt her book. There had been at one moment a slight murmur in the drawing-room at Mansfield Park about sending her a prayer-book, but nothing came of it. Mrs. Norris had gone home and taken down two old prayer-books of her husband with that idea. But, upon examination, the ardour of generosity went off. One was found to have too small a print for a child’s eyes, and the other to be too cumbersome for her to carry about.

Fatigued and unable to sit much longer, Fanny was thankful to accept the invitation of going to bed. Before Betsey had finished crying at being allowed to sit up only one extra hour in honour of sister, she was off, leaving all below in confusion and noise again—the boys begging for toasted cheese, her father calling out for his rum and water, and Rebecca never where she ought to be, and very likely consorting with a mummy. . . .

There was nothing to raise Fanny’s spirits in the confined and scantily furnished chamber that she was to share with Susan. The smallness of the rooms above and below, the narrowness of the passage and staircase, all struck her beyond her imagination. She soon learned to think with respect of her own little attic at Mansfield Park, in that house reckoned too small for anybody’s comfort.

Chapter XXXIX