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The Golden Scarecrow by Sir Hugh Walpole
page 60 of 207 (28%)
a noise. Angelina Braid was the quietest little girl in all the Square.
"You'd never meet one nigher a mouse in a week of Sundays," said her
nurse, who was a "gay one" and liked life.

It was not, however, entirely Angelina's fault that she took life
quietly; in 21 March Square, it was exceedingly difficult to do anything
else. Angelina's parents were in India, and she was not conscious, very
acutely, of their existence. Every morning and evening she prayed, "God
bless mother and father in India," but then she was not very acutely
conscious of God either, and so her mind was apt to wander during her
prayers.

She lived with her two aunts--Miss Emmy Braid and Miss Violet Braid--in
the smallest house in the Square. So slim was No. 21, and so ruthlessly
squeezed between the opulent No. 20 and the stout ruddy-faced No. 22,
that it made one quite breathless to look at it; it was exactly as
though an old maid, driven by suffragette wildness, had been arrested by
two of the finest possible policemen, and carried off into custody. Very
little of any kind of wildness was there about the Misses Braid. They
were slim, neat women, whose rather yellow faces had the flat, squashed
look of lawn grass after a garden roller has passed over it. They
believed in God according to the Reverend Stephen Hunt, of St.
Matthew-in-the-Crescent--the church round the corner--but in no other
kind of God whatever. They were not rich, and they were not poor; they
went once a week--Fridays--to visit the poor of St. Matthew's, and
found the poor of St. Matthew's on the whole unappreciative of their
efforts, but that made their task the nobler. Their house was dark and
musty, and filled with little articles left them by their grand-parents,
their parents, and other defunct relations. They had no friendly feeling
towards one another, but missed one another when they were separated.
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