her.

“Oh, golly,” she giggled, “you know what it makes me think of?

[14]Of course, it’s really ‘belly,’ to rhyme with ‘jelly,’” she explained engagingly, “but my grammer makes me say ‘stummick’.”

[14]

Directly she was out of sight, Effie Darrow had hysterics, entirely against her better judgment, for she well know that Emma-leen would gleefully carry the tale to other kitchens, but she was beyond caring for the moment.

Glenwood Darrow, walking in on the scene, became the target of her revilings.

“If you’d settled in a decent neighborhood! If we had a decent house! If you tried—even tried—to get decent people for patients!” The reproaches came forth in little yelps of woe. “If you ever did anything—not for me—I expect nothing, but for your poor child——”

The doctor picked her up roughly but capably, carried her upstairs and put her to bed with a sleeping potion, and took his red-eyed, hot-cheeked daughter for a ten-mile drive into the hills.

That trip, and her father’s words to her, stayed always in her memory beside her mother’s tragic festivity.

“Now, you listen here to me,” he said sternly. “Don’t you ever think you’re not good enough for those little washed-out blue bloods that wouldn’t come to your party! You’re too good, d’you hear? Too good! And I want you to let ’em see that you[15] know you are, understand? My God, I don’t know what they ever did, these people down here, to feel so dressy about, except get beaten to a pulp! Your mother’s got her head full of sentimental slush—well, she’s a sick woman, but you’re a strong, hearty, sensible young one, and I want you to get this thing straight!” Brutally, competently, he bound up the bleeding wounds of her little pride, cauterizing them first with his own bitter, bracing philosophy of life.

[15]

She was able to face her small, giggling world next day with dry eyes and an upheld chin, even—when the hotel child repeated her ditty of the day before—with an outthrust tongue.

The thing, therefore, trivial in itself, had definite consequences. Young Glen Darrow stopped being her mother’s dear little girl and became her father’s boyish daughter. She no longer sought to be very nice to nice little 

 Prev. P 9/147 next