This would worry her excessively
(she loved every brick in the old house, and often said she would rather live
in the kitchen there than in a palace anywhere else), and she would get
into such a state of depression that Frank would finally have to tell her
that he was just "fooling her".
She used to make him do a good deal of waiting on her in return,
and he was the one she used to get to dress old Fashion's back
when it was raw, and to put drops in her eyes. He got quite expert at it.
She said it was a penalty for his worrying her so.
She was the great musician of the connection. This is in itself
no mean praise; for it was the fashion for every musical gift among the girls
to be cultivated, and every girl played or sang more or less, some of them
very well. But Cousin Fanny was not only this. She had a way of playing
that used to make the old piano sound different from itself;
and her voice was almost the sweetest I ever heard except one or two
on the stage. It was particularly sweet in the evenings,
when she sat down at the piano and played. She would not always do it;
she either felt "not in the mood", or "not sympathetic", or some such thing.
None of the others were that way; the rest could play just as well
in the glare of day as in the twilight, and before one person as another;
it was, we all knew, just one of Cousin Fanny's old-maid crotchets.
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