City and town life -- Fiction; Didactic fiction; Indiana -- Fiction; Orphans -- Fiction
"Not like her!" was his mental comment. "I can understand how that
place would become intolerable to her; but I never knew her to give a
dollar to the suffering. Now she makes a princely gift, not because she
is generous, but because the house has become unbearable; and as usual,
with no thought of any one save herself. If the city dares accept, how
her millionaire neighbours will rage at disease and sickness being
brought into the finest residence district! Probably the city will be
compelled to sell it and build somewhere else. But there is something
fitting in the reparation of turning a building that has been a place
of torture to children, into one of healing. It proves that she has a
realizing sense."
He glanced around the bright, cheerful breakfast room, with its
carefully set, flower-decorated table, at his sister at its head, at a
son on either hand, at a pleasant-faced young tutor on one side, and
his Little Brother on the other; for so had James Minturn ordered his
household.
Mrs. Winslow had left a home she loved to come at her brother's urgent
call for help to save his boys. The tutor had only a few hours of his
position, and thus far his salary seemed the attractive feature. James
Jr. and Malcolm were too dazed to be natural for a short time. They had
been picked up bodily, and carried kicking and screaming to this place,
where they had been dressed in plain durable clothing. Malcolm's bed
stood beside Little Brother's in a big sunny room; James' was near the
tutor's in a chamber the counterpart of the other, save for its
bookcases lining one wall.
There was a schoolroom not yet furnished with more than tables and
chairs, its floors and walls bare, its windows having shades only. When
worn out with the struggle the amazed boys had succumbed to sleep on
little, hard, white beds with plain covers; had awakened to a cold bath
at the hands of a man, and when they rebelled and called for Lucette
and their accustomed clothing, were forcibly dressed in linen and khaki.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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