City and town life -- Fiction; Diary fiction; Girls -- Fiction; Love stories, American
"_Ashes_;" she told me, kinder whispery, after she had reached the
front door, for she was afraid somebody would hear; but it gave me a
terrible feeling and I wondered how she got them away from his
relations and whether she had to go to the graveyard in the middle of
the night to do it or not. I comforted myself with the thought that
they would be in a prettily ornamented urn, even if they were ashes,
for I had read about urns in Roman history; but shucks! when she got
back it wasn't a thing but a pink chewing-gum wrapper full of cigar
ashes that he had thrown away one day right in front of her as they
were going up the steps to the library.
Before I had time to tell her how disappointed I was there came a
picture-taking man up the front walk and asked us to let him take
Waterloo's picture for some post-cards. If you were pleased you could
buy them and if you weren't you didn't have to. But he knew of course
there wouldn't any lady be hardhearted enough not to buy a picture of
her own baby.
Nothing could have delighted us more, unless the man had said take
_our_ pictures; and Jean remarked that Waterloo ought to be fixed up
funny to correspond with the string of beads around his neck. She ran
and got a pair of overalls that belonged to the lady she boards with's
little boy and we stuffed Waterloo in. He looked too cute for anything
and we was just settling him down good for the picture when Jean
spoke up again and said oh, wasn't it a pity that he didn't have any
hair on his head, as hair showed up so well in a picture. I told her
it was aristocratic not to have hair when you're a baby, on your head.
She said shucks! how could anything connected with a baby be
aristocratic? This made me mad and I told her maybe she didn't know
what it was to be aristocratic. She said she did, too; it was
aristocratic to have a wide front porch to your house and to eat
sweetbreads when you were dining in a hotel. I was thinking up
something else to say when the picture-taking man said hurry up. There
is a great deal more to this, but it is so late that I'm going to
leave the rest for to-morrow night. Anyhow maybe my grandchildren will
be more interested to go on and read, for magazine writers always chop
their stories off at the most particular spot, when they are going to
be continued, just where you are holding your breath, so as to make
you buy the next number of the magazine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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