"Yes, she's homesick," Peter said gravely, "but not for anything she's left in Colhassett. David told you the story, didn't he?--She is homesick for her own kind, for people she can really love, and she's never found any of them. Her grandfather and grandmother are old and decrepit. She feels a terrible responsibility for them, but she doesn't love them, not really. She's too hungry to love anybody until she finds the friends she can cling to--without compromise." "An emotional aristocrat," Gertrude murmured. "It's the curse of taste." "Help! Help!" Jimmie cried, grimacing at Gertrude. "Didn't she have any kids her own age to play with?" "She had 'em, but she didn't have any time to play with them. You forget she was supporting a family all the time, Jimmie." "By jove, I'd like to forget it." "She had one friend named Albertina Weston that she used to run around with in school. Albertina also wrote poetry. They used to do poetic 'stunts' of one poem a day on some subject selected by Albertina. I think Albertina was a snob. She candidly admitted to Eleanor that if her clothes were more stylish, she would go round with her more. Eleanor seemed to think that was perfectly natural." "How do you do it, Peter?" Jimmie besought. "If I could get one damsel, no matter how tender her years, to confide in me like that I'd be happy for life. It's nothing to you with those eyes, and that matinee forehead of yours; but I want 'em to weep down my neck, and I can't make 'em do it." "Wait till you grow up, Jimmie, and then see what happens," Gertrude soothed him. "Wait till it's your turn with our child," Margaret said. "In two months more she's coming to you." "Do I ever forget it for a minute?" Jimmie cried. "The point of the whole business is," Peter continued, "that we've got a human soul on our hands. We imported a kind of scientific plaything to exercise our spiritual muscle on, and we've got a real specimen of womanhood in embryo. I don't know whether the situation appalls you as much as it does me--" He broke off as he heard the bell ring. "That's David, he said he was coming." Then as David appeared laden with the lost carpetbag and a huge box of chocolates, he waved him to a chair, and took up his speech again. "I don't know whether the situation appalls you, as much as it does me--if I don't get this off my chest now, David, I can't do it at all--but the thought of that poor little waif in there and the struggle she's had, and the shy valiant spirit of her,--the sand that she's got, the _sand_ that put her through and kept her mouth shut through experiences that might easily have killed her, why I feel as if I'd give anything I had in the world to make it up to her, and yet I'm not altogether sure that I could--that we could--that it's any of our business to try it." "There's nobody else who will, if we don't," David said.