How very amusing!’ ‘Amusing? Potato pie? I must say, Dolly, you have the strangest sense of humour. Try as I will, I can see nothing to laugh at in a potato.’ ‘But then, dear, you have never been known for your sense of humour.’ Fifteen all, Villy thought, as she sat at the morning-room desk paying bills for the Duchy. The great-aunts always spent the morning in that room, so named because it did not get morning sun which their generation deemed bad for the complexion, not that the aunts’ complexions were in a state worthy of preservation: Aunt Dolly’s ponderous cheeks, like a spaniel’s ears, were a damp mauve that reminded her of mountains in amateur water colours of Scotland, and Aunt Flo’s resembled, as one of the children had remarked, a dog biscuit peppered with flourishing blackheads – due, as Dolly frequently observed, to her penchant for washing her face in cold water without soap. Flo was crocheting a blanket made from odds and ends of wool, and Dolly was mending a winter vest.
