Phebe, Her Profession / A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book

by Anna Chapin Ray

"Valhalla can't hold you all," Billy had said, when they were making their plans for the summer. "If we take the Lodge, there will be an extra room, and Allyn and Hubert may as well use it. It really won't make any difference how we divide up. At Quantuck the houses only count on foggy days."

In fact, it had been Billy's idea, their choosing Quantuck, that summer. Years before, in his young boyhood, the Farringtons had been there, season after season, and he had always wanted to get back to the old place. Again and again he had been prevented, and it was not until this summer that he had succeeded in carrying out his plans. Now, for the first time in years, Dr. McAlister had consented to take a long vacation; Theodora's novel was locked up in the safe at home, waiting for revision; Hubert was to be with them for three weeks of the time, and Hope had come on from Helena to make the family circle complete.

To no one of the family had the week before the flitting been absolutely enjoyable. On one scorching July morning, Phebe and Phebe's own familiar friend, Isabel St. John, had roused their respective households at four o'clock in order that they might catch the six-thirty train for New York. Once there, they betook themselves to Hester Street in order to study the conditions of life in the East Side. It chanced, however, to be Friday, market day, and the place was a veritable Babel with the cries of the hucksters and the shrill clamor of the women elbowing each other about the push-carts. No one paid any heed to the girls; and on their side, after a brief inspection they paid heed to but one question, how to get out of the region as speedily as possible. Accordingly, they went up town to lunch, strolled about Twenty-third Street for an hour or two before going to the office of the fresh-air charity, and, late that evening, reappeared at their own front doors, each with a wan and weary child at her heels. Isabel's was a boy; Phebe, in deference to the conditions of a family treaty, had a girl.

For about three weeks, Phebe's table had been heaped with books on child-study, on pedagogy, on domestic hygiene; her room had been littered with syllabi on child impressions in every conceivable relation. Phebe was resolved to be scientific, or die in the attempt. She came nearer achieving the latter alternative. The struggle began on the first morning of her new charge. She was up early and ran down to the kitchen to put the oatmeal over the fire. Then full of courage and sociological zeal, she approached the tub, a thermometer in one hand, the child in the other. The fray which followed, was a short one. It began with Phebe's dropping the thermometer on the floor and plumping the child bodily into the bath. It ended with the child's breaking away and diving into bed again, dripping with bath-water and tears, while Phebe picked up the scattered fragments of the thermometer and fished the towels from the tub where they floated limply.

During the next half hour, Phebe parted with most of her theories and all of her temper. In the first place, she had never before tried to dress a child, and this first experience was not a pleasing one. The child's toes persisted in catching in the tops of the stockings, the little waist seemed to her unaccustomed eyes to be constructed upside down, and the scant little skirt went on hind side before. In spite of shrill protestations, she braided up the lanky hair and scoured a patch of skin in the very middle of the child's face, and at last the toilet was complete. Breakfast brought with it a new chapter in her experiences. No arguments could induce the child to touch the oatmeal, unless it were combined with equal parts of sugar, and Phebe meekly yielded to the inevitable, while she hung up the dripping sheets to dry. Then she locked the child into her room, and went wearily down to join the others at the breakfast-table.

Later, when she appeared on the lawn, leading her charge by the hand, Mac came forward to meet them. With his pudgy hands clasped behind him and his small legs wide apart, he halted in front of the girl and, bending forward, peered up under her sunbonnet.

"Shake hands, baby," he said encouragingly.

The child obediently put out one small fist; but unluckily Phebe had spent all her energies on the face and neglected the hands entirely. Mac looked at the grimy fingers, recalled the talk at the breakfast-table and put his own hands behind him once more.

"Nahsty little girl!" he said severely, and, turning on his heel, departed in search of Allyn.

For the next seven days, Phebe passed through every variety of toil and woe and anxiety, also, it must be confessed, of teasing from her family. According to its lights, the child was good. It was not bright enough to be mischievous; it was pitifully apathetic on most points. In four directions, however, it held pronounced opinions, and, moreover, it had the courage of its convictions. It refused to be left alone for more than five minutes at a time; it refused to be washed; it refused to eat plain food, and it persisted, in spite of all opposition, in calling Phebe grandma. The title suggested affectionate devotion; but Phebe would have given up the devotion with perfect readiness.