"My aunt Beulah wears her hair to high of her forrid.
"My aunt Margaret wears her hair to slic on the sides.
"My aunt Gertrude wears her hair just about right.
"My aunt Margaret is the best looking, and has the nicest way.
"My aunt Gertrude is the funniest. I never laugh at what she says, but I have trouble not to. By thinking of Grandpa"s rheumaticks I stop myself just in time. Aunt Beulah means all right, and wants to do right and have everybody else the same.
"Uncle David is not handsome, but good.
"Uncle Jimmie is not handsome, but his hair curls.
"Uncle Peter is the most handsome man that ere the sun shown on. That is poetry. He has beautiful teeth, and I like him.
"Yesterday the Wordsworth Club--that"s what Uncle Jimmie calls us because he says we are seven--went to the Art Museum to edjucate me in art.
"Aunt Beulah wanted to take me to one room and keep me there until I asked to come out. Uncle Jimmie wanted to show me the statures. Uncle David said I ought to begin with the Ming period and work down to Art Newvoo. Aunts Gertrude and Margaret wanted to take me to the room of the great masters. While they were talking Uncle Peter and I went to see a picture that made me cry. I asked him who she was. He said that wasn"t the important thing, that the important thing was that one man had nailed his dream. He didn"t doubt that lots of other painters had, but this one meant the most to him. When I cried he said, "You"re all right, Baby. You know." Then he reached down and kissed me."
As the month progressed, it seemed to Beulah that she was making distinct progress with the child. Since the evening when Peter had won Eleanor"s confidence and explained her mental processes, her task had been illumined for her. She belonged to that cla.s.s of women in whom maternity arouses late. She had not the facile sympathy which accepts a relationship without the endors.e.m.e.nt of the understanding, and she was too young to have much toleration for that which was not perfectly clear to her.
She had started in with high courage to demonstrate the value of a sociological experiment. She hoped later, though these hopes she had so far kept to herself, to write, or at least to collaborate with some worthy educator, on a book which would serve as an exact guide to other philanthropically inclined groups who might wish to follow the example of cooperative adoption; but the first day of actual contact with her problem had chilled her. She had put nothing down in her note-book. She had made no scientific progress. There seemed to be no intellectual response in the child.
Peter had set all these things right for her. He had shown her the child"s uncompromising integrity of spirit. The keynote of Beulah"s nature was, as Jimmie said, that she "had to be shown." Peter pointed out the fact to her that Eleanor"s slogan also was, "No compromise."
As Eleanor became more familiar with her surroundings this spirit became more and more evident.
"I could let down the hem of these dresses, Aunt Beulah," she said one day, looking down at the long stretch of leg protruding from the chic blue frock that made her look like a Boutet de Monvil. "I can"t hem very good, but my st.i.tches don"t show much."
"That dress isn"t too short, dear. It"s the way little girls always wear them. Do little girls on Cape Cod wear them longer?"
"Yes, Aunt Beulah."
"How long do they wear them?"
"Albertina," they had reached the point of discussion of Albertina now, and Beulah was proud of it, "wore her dresses to her ankles, be--because her--her legs was so fat. She said that mine was--were getting to be fat too, and it wasn"t refined to wear short dresses, when your legs were fat."
"There are a good many conflicting ideas of refinement in the world, Eleanor," Beulah said.
"I"ve noticed there are, since I came to New York," Eleanor answered unexpectedly.
Beulah"s academic spirit recognized and rejoiced in the fact that with all her docility, Eleanor held firmly to her preconceived notions. She continued to wear her dresses short, but when she was not actually on exhibition, she hid her long legs behind every available bit of furniture or drapery.
The one doubt left in her mind, of the child"s initiative and executive ability, was destined to be dissipated by the rather heroic measures sometimes resorted to by a superior agency taking an ironic hand in the game of which we have been too inhumanly sure.
On the fifth week of Eleanor"s stay Beulah became a real aunt, the cook left, and her own aunt and official chaperon, little Miss Prentis, was laid low with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism.
Beulah"s excitement on these various counts, combined with indiscretions in the matter of overshoes and overfatigue, made her an easy victim to a wandering grip germ. She opened her eyes one morning only to shut them with a groan of pain. There was an ache in her head and a thickening in her chest, the significance of which she knew only too well. She found herself unable to rise. She lifted a hoa.r.s.e voice and called for Mary, the maid, who did not sleep in the house but was due every morning at seven. But the gentle knock on the door was followed by the entrance of Eleanor, not Mary.
"Mary didn"t come, Aunt Beulah. I thought you was--were so tired, I"d let you have your sleep out. I heard Miss Prentis calling, and I made her some gruel, and I got my own breakfast."
"Oh! how dreadful," Beulah gasped in the face of this new calamity; "and I"m really so sick. I don"t know what we"ll do."
Eleanor regarded her gravely. Then she put a professional hand on her pulse and her forehead.
"You"ve got the grip," she announced.
"I"m afraid I have, Eleanor, and Doctor Martin"s out of town, and won"t be back till to-morrow when he comes to Aunt Ann. I don"t know what we"ll do."
"I"ll tend to things," Eleanor said. "You lie still and close your eyes, and don"t put your arms out of bed and get chilled."
"Well, you"ll have to manage somehow," Beulah moaned; "how, I don"t know, I"m sure. Give Aunt Annie her medicine and hot water bags, and just let me be. I"m too sick to care what happens."
After the door had closed on the child a dozen things occurred to Beulah that might have been done for her. She was vaguely faint for her breakfast. Her feet were cold. She thought of the soothing warmth of antiphlogistine when applied to the chest. She thought of the quinine on the shelf in the bathroom. Once more she tried lifting her head, but she could not accomplish a sitting posture. She shivered as a draft from the open window struck her.
"If I could only be taken in hand this morning," she thought, "I know it could be broken."
The door opened softly. Eleanor, in the cook"s serviceable ap.r.o.n of gingham that would have easily contained another child the same size, swung the door open with one hand and held it to accommodate the pa.s.sage of the big kitchen tray, deeply laden with a heterogeneous collection of objects. She pulled two chairs close to the bedside and deposited her burden upon them. Then she removed from the tray a goblet of some steaming fluid and offered it to Beulah.
"It"s cream of wheat gruel," she said, and added ingratiatingly: "It tastes nice in a tumbler."
Beulah drank the hot decoction gratefully and found, to her surprise, that it was deliciously made.
Eleanor took the gla.s.s away from her and placed it on the tray, from which she took what looked to Beulah like a cloth covered omelet,--at any rate, it was a crescent shaped article slightly yellow in tone.
Eleanor tested it with a finger.
"It"s just about right," she said. Then she fixed Beulah with a stern eye. "Open your chest," she commanded, "and show me the spot where it"s worst. I"ve made a meal poultice."
Beulah hesitated only a second, then she obeyed meekly. She had never seen a meal poultice before, but the heat on her afflicted chest was grateful to her. Antiphlogistine was only Denver mud anyhow. Meekly, also, she took the six grains of quinine and the weak dose of jamaica ginger and water that she was next offered. She felt encouraged and refreshed enough by this treatment to display some slight curiosity when the little girl produced a card of villainous looking safety-pins.
"I"m going to pin you in with these, Aunt Beulah," she said, "and then sweat your cold out of you."
"Indeed, you"re not," Beulah said; "don"t be absurd, Eleanor. The theory of the grip is--," but she was addressing merely the vanishing hem of cook"s voluminous ap.r.o.n.
The child returned almost instantly with three objects of a.s.sorted sizes that Beulah could not identify. From the outside they looked like red flannel and from the way Eleanor handled them it was evident that they also were hot.
"I het--heated the flatirons," Eleanor explained, "the way I do for Grandma, and I"m going to spread "em around you, after you"re pinned in the blankets, and you got to lie there till you prespire, and prespire good."
"I won"t do it," Beulah moaned, "I won"t do any such thing. Go away, child."
"I cured Grandma and Grandpa and Mrs. O"Farrel"s aunt that I worked for, and I"m going to cure you," Eleanor said.
"No."
Eleanor advanced on her threateningly.
"Put your arms under those covers," she said, "or I"ll dash a gla.s.s of cold water in your face,"--and Beulah obeyed her.