Belle always enjoyed dining with Brenda. The dining-room was so attractive with its great blazing fire, its heavy draperies and cheerful oil-paintings on the wall. At home she sat down in a large, severely furnished room, with her solemn grandmother wrapped in a white knitted shawl at one end of the long table, her half-deaf uncle James at the other end, and her brother Jack on the side opposite her. Her delicate mother often dined upstairs. Uncle James usually had some story to tell of misdeeds that he had heard some one ascribe to Jack ("and how a deaf person can hear I don't see," Jack would say crossly to Brenda). Her grandmother generally read Belle herself a lecture on paying proper respect to one's elders, or some similar subject, while Belle and Jack exchanged glances of mischievous intelligence, which often drew strong reproofs from their grandmother, and sometimes from her mother when she was present.