I have a lot of new clothes for Ethelyn, too, and I want you to look as well as she does.

While you are with us you must be suitably dressed, else I shall feel ashamed of your appearance." Poor Patty began to wonder whether it was so very nice after all, to have fine clothes if she could have no voice in their selection.
But she thought, what is the use of objecting?
Aunt Isabel will do as she pleases anyway, and while I'm staying with her, I ought to agree to what she wants.
Then two dressmakers came to stay a fortnight.

Ethelyn and Patty were given a holiday from lessons, the schoolroom was turned into a sewing-room, and Miss Morton and Reginald betook themselves to the library.
Patty was rather sorry to miss her school hours, for the history lessons had become interesting, but she soon found that Aunt Isabel's word was law.
It was a law often broken by her own children, but Patty was not of a mutinous heart, and she amiably obeyed Mrs.St.Clair's commands.

But she had her own opinion of the household, and she did not hesitate to express it plainly in her letters to her father.
"I begin to see," she wrote to him one day, "what you meant when you explained to me about proportion.

In this house, money, and fine clothes, and making a great show, are out of all proportion to everything else.