The Sick-a-Bed Lady: And Also Hickory Dock, The Very Tired Girl, The Happy-Day, Something That Happened in October, The Amateur Lover, Heart of The City, The Pink Sash, Woman's Only BusinessAbbott, Eleanor Hallowell
General
The Sick-a-Bed Lady: And Also Hickory Dock, The Very Tired Girl, The Happy-Day, Something That Happened in October, The Amateur Lover, Heart of The City, The Pink Sash, Woman's Only Business
Abbott, Eleanor Hallowell
Fiction; Short stories
to him, but she never dreamed of telling you till you were old enough to
bear it. To Ladykin, Truth out of season was sourer than strawberries at
Christmas time.
Sam would have told you _anything_ the very first second that he found
it out. Sam was perfectly great for Truth. He could tell more Great
Black Truths in one day than there were thunder-clouds in the whole hot
summer sky. This quality made Sam just a little bit dangerous in a
crowd. He was always and forever shooting people with Truths that he
didn't know were loaded. He was always telling the Grandmother-Lady, for
instance, that her hair looked _exactly_ like a wig. He was always
telling Ladykin that she smelled of raspberry jam. He was always telling
you that he didn't believe your Father really loved you. Oh, everything
that Sam said was as straight and lank and honest as a lady's hair when
it's out of crimp. Nothing in the world could be straighter than that.
But sometimes, when you had played sturdily with Sam for a good many
hours, you used to coax Ladykin off all alone to the puffy,
scorchy-looking smoke tree, where you could cuddle up on the rustic seat
and rest your Honesty. And when you were thoroughly rested, you used to
stretch your little arms behind your yawning face and beg:
"Oh, Ladykin, wouldn't you, couldn't you _please_ say something curly?"
Ladykin's mind seemed to curl perfectly naturally. The crimp of it never
came out. Almost any time you could take her words that looked so little
and tight, and unwind them and unwind them into yards and yards and
yards of pleasant, magic meanings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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