Girls -- Fiction; Harpeth Valley (Tenn.) -- Fiction
"Any clue?" asked Roxanne, as anxiously as Roxanne could ask about
anything from the cloud.
"N--o," he said in a hesitating sort of way that seemed just as
professional as the way the detectives talk in the wonderful stories
in the magazines that my governess always reproved me for reading.
"That was a slick artist who got away on greased heels, but there is
a--smell in there that I've never felt before in the shed. And yet I
have met it somewhere, I feel certain. It seems to my nose somewhat
like the bug-doctor at his worst."
"No, Tony," said Lovelace Peyton, positively but perfectly calmly, "I
ain't been in that shed and my bottles ain't got legs."
We all laughed and came to the house--but I had got a whiff of that
odor and I knew where I had met it before. It was raw onion and tar,
and it was the mixture that Lovelace Peyton had given Father in the
bottle he wrapped in his handkerchief and put in his pocket. I felt
weak all over for a second, but I immediately remembered my duty to
respect my father even in my thoughts. I had decided that in the
watches of last night, after I had found his heart and hugged it up
outside of Mother's door.
In the first place, I had no business to read those magazines that my
governess told me not to, even if she did have so little sense that
her brain must have been made of tatting work originally, which she
was always doing by the yard. And while the explanation of what an
evil it is to get millions and millions of dollars together when the
poor have so little, and that no man who has a human heart in his
breast would want to do it is perfectly true, still that man who wrote
the article might not have known about my father. I can see how a man
might go on for years and do a great wrong to his brother man and
really not realize what a monster it makes of him. I believe my father
is just blind on that side of things like some people are in one eye.
I pray God that he may wake up sometime, and die happy but poor! Of
course, I know he had nothing to do with taking the steel secret, and
I am going to get on the cloud again and not worry over Roxanne's
troubles until she needs something; and then I will come down and get
it for her while she stays in the air,--if I can.
[Illustration: Tony ... nosed almost every inch of the shed]
The really important things in a person's life underlie the daily
occurrence like the sand that is at the bottom of the rose-bushes.
School is the sand-bank of a girl's life, rather heavy, but supporting
the roses of debates and picnics and commencement and expression
impersonations like the one Friday night is to be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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