American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American
They was a row on all the time about the kids, which they hadn't been
till Miss Estelle come. Mrs. Booth she said they could kill their own
selves if they wanted to, but she had more right than anybody to say
what went into William's digestive ornaments, and she didn't want him
brought up scientific nohow, but just human. He was always making notes
on William, which was how William come to take so little interest in
life after a while. But Miss Estelle, she egged him on. She seen he
didn't have no sense about his money, which had been left to him when
he was a sure enough perfessor in a college before he quit and went nuts
and everything begun to go wrong between him and Mrs. Booth, so Miss
Estelle she took to running his money herself; but she seen likewise
that when it come to writing articles about William's insides and
intellectuals the perfessor he was a genius. Well, maybe he was; but
Biddy wouldn't let him try none of them laboratory gags on her though
she just as soon be hypnotized and telepathed as not just to humor him.
Miss Estelle, she eat what the perfessor give her, and after a while
she says she'll take charge of the children's education herself, their
mother being a frivolous young thing, and it was too bad, she says, a
genius like him couldn't a-mar-ried a noble woman who would a-understood
his great work for humanity and sympathized with it. So while the
perfessor filled William and Miss Margery up on new discovered food and
weighed 'em and probed 'em and sterilized 'em and did everything else
but put 'em in glass bottles, Miss Estelle she laid out courses of
reading matter for them and tended to their religion and intellectuals
and things like that. I reckon they never was two kids more completely
educated, inside and out. It hadn't worked much on Miss Margery yet, her
being younger than William. But William took it hard and serious, being
more like his father's family, and it made bumps all over his head. I
reckon by the time William was ten years old he knew more than a whole
high school, and every time that boy cut his finger he just naturally
bled science. But somehow he wasn't very chipper, and whenever the
perfessor would notice that he and Miss Estelle would change treatment.
But Biddy liked William just the same, they hadn't spoiled his
disposition none; and she said he seen a lot of things his aunt never
would a-seen, William did. One day when I first was a guest I says to
his aunt, I says:
“Miss Booth, William looks kind o' pale to me like he was getting too
much bringin' up to the square inch.”
She acted like she didn't care for no outsiders butting in, but I
seen she'd noticed it, too, and she liked William, too, in a kind of
scientific sort of a way, and she says in a minute:
“What do you suggest?”
“Why,” says I, “what a kid like that needs is to roll around and play in
the dirt now and then, and yell and holler.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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