"What"s on your face?" asked one woman sternly.
Phbe hung her head, abashed.
"That"s how nice she plays when I leave her go up on the garret and have a nice time instead of making her sew like she always has to Sat.u.r.days,"
Aunt Maria said in sharp tones which told the child all too plainly of the displeasure she had caused.
"I didn"t mean," Phbe looked up contritely, "I didn"t mean to be bad and make you cross. I was just playing I was a big singer and I put cold cream and paint and powder on my face----"
"Cream!"
"Paint!"
"Powder!"
The shrill staccato words of the women set the child trembling.
"But--but," she faltered, "it"ll all wash off." She gave a convincing nod of her head and rubbed a hand ruefully across the grotesquely decorated cheek. "It"s just cream and red-beet juice and flour."
"Did I ever!" exclaimed the mother of Phares Eby.
"I-to-goodness!" laughed Granny Hogendobler.
"Vanity, vanity, all is vanity," quoted one of the other women.
"Come here, Phbe," said the mother of David Eby, and that woman, a thin, alert little person with tender, kindly eyes, drew the unhappy little girl to her. "You poor, precious child," she said, "it"s a shame for us all to sit here and look at you as if we wanted to eat you.
You"ve just been playing, haven"t you?" She turned to the other women.
"Why, Maria, Susan, I remember just as well as if it were only yesterday how we used to rub our cheeks with rough mullein leaves to make them red for Love Feast, don"t you remember?"
Aunt Maria"s cheeks grew pink. "Ach, Barbara, mebbe we did that when we were young and foolish, but we didn"t act like this."
"Not much different, I guess," said Phbe"s champion with a smile. "Only we forget it now. Phbe is just like we were once and she"ll get over it like we did. Let her play; she"ll soon be too old to want to play or to know how. She ain"t a bad child, just full of life and likes to do things other people don"t think of doing."
"She, surely does," said Aunt Maria curtly, ill pleased by the woman"s words. "Where that child gets all her notions from I"d like to know.
It"s something new every day."
"She"ll be all right when she gets older," said David"s mother.
"Be sure, yes," agreed Granny Hogendobler; "it don"t do to be too strict."
"Mebbe so," said the other women, with various shades of understanding in their words.
Phbe looked gratefully into the face of Granny Hogendobler, then she turned to David"s mother and spoke to her as though there were no others present in the room.
"You know, don"t you, how little girls like to play? You called me precious child just like she would----"
"She would," repeated Aunt Maria. "What do you mean?"
"I mean my mother," she explained and turned again to her champion. "I was just thinking this after on the garret that I"d like you for my mother, to adopt you for it like people do with children when they have none and want some. I hear lots of people call you Aunty Bab--dare I call you Mother Bab?"
The woman laid a hand on the child"s tumbled hair. Her voice trembled as she answered, "Yes, Phbe, you can call me Mother Bab. I have no little girl so you may fill that place. Now ask Aunt Maria if you should wash your face and get fixed right again."
"Shall I, Aunt Maria?"
"Yes. Go get cleaned up. Fold all them clothes right and put "em in the trunk and put your hair in two plaits again. If you"re big enough to do such dumb things you"re big enough to comb your hair." And Aunt Maria, peeved and hurt at the child"s behavior, went back to her quilting while Phbe hurried from the room alone.
The child scrubbed the three layers of decoration from her face, trudged up the stairs to the attic, took off the rose-sprigged gown and folded it away--a disconsolate, disillusioned prima donna.
When the attic was once more restored to its orderliness she closed the window and went down-stairs to wrestle with her curls. They were tangled, but ordinarily she would have been able to braid them into some semblance of neatness, but the trying experience of the past moments, the joy of gaining an adopted mother, set her fingers bungling.
"Ach, I can"t, I just can"t make two braids!" she said at length, ready to burst into tears.
Then she remembered David. "Mebbe he"s on the porch yet. I"ll go see once."
With the narrow brown ribbons streaming from her hand and a hair-brush tucked under one arm she ran down the stairs. She found David, for once a gloomy figure, on the back porch, just where she had left him.
"David," she said softly, "will you help me?"
"Why"--his face brightened as he looked at her--"you ain"t"--he started to say "crying"--"you ain"t mad at me for getting you into trouble with Aunt Maria?"
"Ach, no. And I ain"t never going to be mad at you now for I just adopted your mom for my mom--mother. She"s going to be my Mother Bab; she said so."
"What?"
He knitted his forehead in a puzzled frown. Phbe explained how kind his mother had been, how she understood what little girls like to do, how she had promised to be Mother Bab.
"You don"t care, Davie, you ain"t jealous?" she ended anxiously.
"Sure not," he a.s.sured her; "I think it"s kinda nice, for she thinks you"re a dandy. But did they haul you over the coals in there?"
"Yes, a little, all but Granny Hogendobler and your mom--Mother Bab, I mean. Isn"t it funny to get a mother when you didn"t have one for so long?"
"Guess so."
"But, David, will you help me? I can"t fix my hair and Aunt Maria is so mad at me she said I can just fix it myself. The plaits won"t come right at all. Will you help me, please?" She a.s.serted her femininity by adding new sweetness to her voice as she asked the uncommon favor.
"Why"--he hesitated, then looked about to see if any one were near to witness what he was about to do--"I don"t know if I can. I never braided hair, but I guess I can."
"Be sure you can, David. You braid it just like we braid the daisy stems and the dandelion stems in the fields. You"re so handy with them, you can do most anything, I guess."
Spurred by her appreciation of his ability he took the brush and began to brush the tangled hair as she sat on the porch at his feet.
"Gee," he exclaimed as the hair sprang into curls when the brush left it, "your hair"s just like gold!"
"And it"s curly," she added proudly.
"Sure is. Wouldn"t Phares look if he saw it! I told him your hair is prettier than Mary Warner"s and he said I was silly to talk about girls"
hair."