One day she stopped Uncle Marius, hurrying past her up the stairs, and
asked him: "What are you thinking of, Uncle Marius?"
"What am I thinking of? What do you mean?" he repeated, his face and
eyes twitching the way they did when he couldn't understand something
right off.
"Why, Auntie Madeleine keeps asking everybody all the time, 'What _can_
the doctor be thinking of?' I just wondered."
He bent to kiss her raspingly--there were stiff little stubby white
hairs coming out all over his face--and he said, as he trotted on up the
stairs, "I am thinking of making sure that you have a mother, my poor
dear."
And then there was a bigger change one day. She went to bed in her own
little crib, and when she woke up she wasn't there at all, but in a big
bed in a room at Aunt Julia's; and Aunt Julia was smiling at her, and
hugging her, and saying she was so glad she had come to live with her
and Uncle Marius for a while. Ariadne found out that Uncle Marius had
brought her and Muvver the night before in a carriage all the way from
Bellevue. She regretted excessively that she had not been awake to enjoy
the adventure.
At Aunt Julia's, things were quieter. All at once the other people, the
other uncles and aunts, had disappeared. That, of course, was because
she and Muvver were at Aunt Julia's. She conceived of the house in
Bellevue as still filled with their angry faces and voices, still
echoing to "Indecent! indecent!" and "What _do_ you suppose people
are saying?"
There was a long, long time after this when nothing special happened.
The new man continued to come here, and his visits were the only events
in Ariadne's quiet days. Apparently he came to see Ariadne, for he never
went to see Muvver at all, as he used to do in Bellevue. He took Ariadne
out in the back yard as the weather began to get warmer, and showed her
lots of outdoor plays. He was as nice as ever, only a good deal whiter;
and that was odd, for they were now in May, and from playing outdoors
all the time Ariadne herself was as brown as a berry. At least, that was
what Aunt Julia said. Ariadne accepted it with her usual patient
indulgence of grown-ups' mistakes. There was not, of course, a single
berry that was anything but red or black, or at least a sort of blue,
like huckleberries in milk. She and 'Stashie had gone over them, one by
one; they knew.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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