City and town life -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
“What are you going to do with your Freak?” called out Julius
Steinberger.
Tembarom actually started. As things had surged over him, he had had
too much to think over. He had not had time to give to his strange
responsibility; it had become one nevertheless.
“Are you going to leave him behind when you go to England?”
He leaned forward and put his chin on his hand.
“Why, say,” he said, as though he were thinking it out, “he's spoken
about England two or three times. He's said he must go there. By jings!
I'll take him with me, and see what'll happen.”
When Little Ann got up to leave the room he followed her and her father
into the hall.
“May I come up and talk it over with you?” he appealed. “I've got to
talk to some one who knows something about it. I shall go dotty if I
don't. It's too much like a dream.”
“Come on up when you're ready,” answered Hutchinson. “Ann and me can
give you a tip or two.”
“I'm going to be putting the last things in the trunks,” said Ann, “but
I dare say you won't mind that. The express'll be here by eight in the
morning.”
“O Lord!” groaned Tembarom.
When he went up to the fourth floor a little later, Hutchinson had
fallen into a doze in his chair over his newspaper, and Ann was kneeling
by a trunk in the hall, folding small articles tightly, and fitting them
into corners. To Tembarom she looked even more than usual like a slight
child thing one could snatch up in one's arms and carry about or set on
one's knee without feeling her weight at all. An inferior gas-jet on the
wall just above her was doing its best with the lot of soft, red hair,
which would have been an untidy bundle if it had not been hers.
Tembarom sat down on the trunk next to her.
“O Little Ann!” he broke out under his breath, lest the sound of his
voice might check Hutchinson's steady snoring. “O Little Ann!”
Ann leaned back, sitting upon her small heels, and looked up at him.
“You're all upset, and it's not to be wondered at, Mr. Temple Barholm,”
she said.
“Upset! You're going away to-morrow morning! And, for the Lord's sake,
don't call me that!” he protested.
“You're going away yourself next Wednesday. And you ARE Mr. Temple
Barholm. You'll never be called anything else in England.
“How am I going to stand it?” he protested again. “How could a fellow
like me stand it! To be yanked out of good old New York, and set down in
a place like a museum, with Central Park round it, and called Mr. Temple
Temple Barholm instead of just 'Tem' or 'T. T.'! It's not natural.”
“What you must do, Mr. Temple Barholm, is to keep your head clear,
that's all,” she replied maturely.
“Lord! if I'd got a head like yours!”
She seemed to take him in, with a benign appreciativeness, in his
entirety.
“Well, you haven't,” she admitted, though quite without disparagement,
merely with slight reservation. “But you've got one like your own. And
it's a good head--when you try to think steady. Yours is a man's head,
and mine's only a woman's.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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