Kathleen appeared on the scene, and Kathleen's ears, too, grew well
accustomed to the same phrase after Peter was born.
"Julia never did a naughty thing in her life, nor spoke a wrong word,"
said her father once, proudly.
"Never mind, she's only ten, and there's hope for her yet," Captain
Carey had replied cheerfully; though if he had known her a little later,
in her first Beulah days, he might not have been so sanguine. She seemed
to have no instinct of adapting herself to the family life, standing
just a little aloof and in an attitude of silent criticism. She was a
trig, smug prig, Nancy said, delighting in her accidental muster of
three short, hard, descriptive words. She hadn't a bit of humor, no fun,
no gayety, no generous enthusiasms that carried her too far for safety
or propriety. She brought with her to Beulah sheaves of school
certificates, and when she showed them to Gilbert with their hundred per
cent deportment and ninety-eight and seven-eighths per cent scholarship
every month for years, he went out behind the barn and kicked its
foundations savagely for several minutes. She was a sort of continual
Sunday child, with an air of church and cold dinner and sermon-reading
and hymn-singing and early bed. Nobody could fear, as for some
impulsive, reckless little creature, that she would come to a bad end.
Nancy said no one could imagine her as coming to anything, not even
an end!
"You never let mother hear you say these things, Nancy," Kathleen
remarked once, "but really and truly it's just as bad to say them at
all, when you know she wouldn't approve."
"My present object is to be as good as gold in mother's eyes, but there
I stop!" retorted Nancy cheerfully. "Pretty soon I shall get virtuous
enough to go a step further and endeavor to please the angels,--not
Julia's cast-iron angels, but the other angels, who understand and are
patient, because they remember our frames and know that being dust we
are likely to be dusty once in a while. Julia wasn't made of dust. She
was made of--let me see--of skim milk and baked custard (the watery
kind) and rice flour and gelatine, with a very little piece of overripe
banana,--not enough to flavor, just enough to sicken. Stir this up with
weak barley water without putting in a trace of salt, sugar, spice, or
pepper, set it in a cool oven, take it out before it is done, and you
will get Julia."
Nancy was triumphant over this recipe for making Julias, only regretting
that she could never show it to her mother, who, if critical, was always
most appreciative. She did send it in a letter to the Admiral, off in
China, and he, being "none too good for human nature's daily food,"
enjoyed it hugely and never scolded her at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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