City and town life -- Fiction; Diary fiction; Girls -- Fiction; Love stories, American
But the oranges hadn't forgotten about being there! I reckon they
wanted to see what all that disturbance was about for, I cross my
heart, _just_ as I got opposite the swellest-looking man in that whole
string of sleepers, a man with silk socks and golf sticks, a long
sleeve of mother's knit corset-cover dropped down against the seat in
front of him and four oranges rolled out! They rolled slowly, one by
one, and dropped to the floor with muffled thuds. Then they rolled
some more and didn't stop until they reached his feet.
That's how I knew he had on silk socks.
CHAPTER XIV
I'm as lonesome as _Marianna in the Moated Grange_ to-night! Isn't
that the lonesomest poem on earth? Everything about it is unsanitary,
too, from the rusty flower-pots to the blue fly "buzzing in the pane."
No wonder it got on Marianna's nerves, in her condition, too! But she
had one thing to be thankful for--she didn't know how many germs that
fly had on its feet!
I'm lonesome for Jean--or somebody! Thank goodness it is nearly time
for Waterloo to come! Cousin Eunice said in a letter that we had from
her to-day she was trying to raise Waterloo right, but he was a trial
to her feelings! Now, poor Cousin Eunice has read Herbert Spencer for
the sake of Waterloo's future education ever since he has been born,
and she has never let him out of her sight with a nurse for fear she
would feed him chewed-up chestnuts and teach him about the Devil. I
reckon you spell him with a capital letter, if you don't waste them on
presiding elders. But Waterloo doesn't always show how carefully he's
been brought up. He is of nervous temperament and told a woman who was
sewing on the machine right loud the other day: "Hus', hus'! God's
sake, make noise _easy_!"
This is disheartening after all the trouble she has taken with his
morals and diet and things like that! She never lets him eat the
"deadly" things that Doctor Gordon is always talking about, but she
_does_ keep a little pure sugar candy on hand all the time to be used
only as a last resort. When she can't make him do any other way on
earth she uses the candy.
Speaking of deadly things reminds me of Doctor Bynum's friends, the
germs. He has told Miss Irene so many stories about their unpleasant
ways that she got to not believing in kissing, but he said pshaw! it
looked like we all had to die of germs anyhow, and so he'd rather die
of that kind than any other!
Cousin Eunice's letters always tell us so many interesting things
about all our friends in the city. She and Ann Lisbeth still live
close neighbors, but they have both bought beautiful places out on one
of the pikes and each one is claiming to be more countrified than the
other. One day Ann Lisbeth ran over and told Cousin Eunice that Doctor
Gordon had heard an owl in their yard the night before, but Cousin
Eunice told her that wasn't anything! She and Rufe had had a _bat_ in
their bedroom!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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