Jeanne was quite certain that her girl cousins had never _played_.
Harold, to be sure, occasionally played jokes on the younger members of
the family or on the servants; but they were usually rather cruel,
unpleasant jokes, like putting a rat in Maggie's bed, or water in
Pearl's shoes, or spiders down Clara's back. For Jeanne, he reserved the
pleasant torture of teasing her about her father.
"Ugh!" he would say, holding Jeanne's precious mail as far as possible
from him, while, with the other hand, he held his nose, "this must be
for you--it smells of fish. Your father must have sold a couple while he
was writing this."
Sometimes he would point to shoe advertisements in the papers, with:
"Here's your chance, Miss Savage. No need to go barefoot when your five
years are up. Just lay in a whopping supply of shoes, all sizes, at
one-sixty-nine."
His grandfather liked his youngest grandchild's manners. He told
himself, once he even told his son, that he couldn't possibly give any
affection to the daughter of "that wretched Frenchman" who had stolen
_his_ daughter. Perhaps he couldn't, just at first. No doubt, he
_thought_ he couldn't. But he _did_. 'Way down in his lonesome old
heart he was glad that mathematics were hard for her, because he was
glad that she needed his help.
"Just what are you thinking?" asked her grandfather, one day.
"I was making an example," explained Jeanne. "I've been here seven
months. That leaves four years and five months; but the last two months
went faster than the first two. If five years seemed like a thousand
years to begin with, and the last two months--"
"I refuse," said her grandfather, with a sudden twinkle in his eye, "to
tackle any such example as that."
"Well," laughed Jeanne, "here's another. Miss Wardell asked us in school
today to decide what we'd like to do when we're grown up. We're to tell
her tomorrow."
"Rather short notice, isn't it?"
"Ye--es," said Jeanne. "You see, ever since I visited Miss Warden's
sister's kindergarten, I've thought I'd like to teach _that_. But I
thought I'd like to get married, too."
"What!" gasped her grandfather.
"Get married. I should like to bring up a family _right_--with the
proper tools. Old Captain says you have to have the proper tools to sew
with. _I_ think you have to have the proper tools to bring up a family.
Tooth-brushes and stocking-straps, smelly soap and cold cream and
underclothes."
"Have you picked out a husband?" asked her grandfather.
"That's the worst of it. You have to have one to earn money to buy the
proper tools. But it's a great nuisance to have a husband around,
Bridget says. She's had three; and she'd rather cook for Satan himself,
she says, than a husband!"
"Jeannette! You mustn't repeat Bridget's conversations. Does Mrs.
Huntington like you to talk to the servants?"
"No," returned Jeanne, blushing a little. "But--but sometimes I just
have to talk. You see--well, you see--"
"Yes?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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