City and town life -- Fiction; Foundlings -- Fiction
"We talked about it a little, kind of loose ends and nothing to fasten
to, like you will. Mis' Emmons was the first to get back inside the
minute.
"'Well,' she says, brisk, 'do let's go in and feed the child while we
have him. Nobody knows when he's had anything to eat but those unholy
cream-puffs. Let's heat him some broth and let's carry in the things.'
"Back by the fire Christopher set doing nothing, but just looking in the
blaze like his very eyesight had been chilly and damp and needed seeing
to. He cried out jolly when he see all the pretty harness of the
chafing-dish and the tray full of promises.
"'Oh,' he cries, '_Robin!_'
"She went over to him, and she nestled him now like she couldn't think
of enough to do for him nor enough things to say to keep him company. I
see Insley watching her, and I wondered if it didn't come to him like it
come to me, that for the pure art of doing nothing so that it seems like
it couldn't be got along without, a woman--some women--can be commended
by heaven to a world that always needs that kind of doing nothing.
"'Children have a genius for getting rid of the things that don't
count,' Miss Sidney says. 'I love his calling me "Robin." Mustn't there
be some place where we don't build walls around our names?'
"Insley thought for a minute. 'You oughtn't to be called "Miss," and
you oughtn't to wear a hat,' he concluded, sober. 'Both of them make
you--too much _there_. They draw a line around you.'
"'I don't feel like Miss to myself,' she says, grave. 'I feel like
Robin. I believe I _am_ Robin!'
"And I made up my mind right then and there that, to myself anyway, I
was always going to call her Robin. It's funny about first names. Some
of them fit right down and snuggle up close to their person so that you
can't think of them apart. And some of them slip loose and dangle along
after their person, quite a ways back, so that you're always surprised
when now and then they catch up and get themselves spoke by someone. But
the name Robin just seemed to wrap Miss Sidney up in itself so that, as
she said, she _was_ Robin. I like to call her so.
"It was her that engineered the chafing-dish. A chafing-dish is a thing
I've always looked on a little askant. I couldn't cook with folks
looking at me no more than I could wash my face in company. I remember
one hot July day when there was a breeze in my front door, I took my
ironing-board in the parlor and tried to iron there. But land, I felt
all left-handed; and I know it would be that way if I ever tried to
cook in there, on my good rug. Robin though, she done it wonderful. And
pretty soon she put the hot cream gravy on some crumbled-up bread and
took it to Christopher, with a cup of broth that smelled like when they
used to say, 'Dinner's ready,' when you was twelve years old.
"He looked up at her eager. 'Can you cut it in squares?' he asked.
"'In what?' she asks him over.
"'Squares. And play it's molasses candy--white molasses candy?' he says.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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