The next morning when she went downstairs it was Belle and not Mrs. Triplett who was stepping about the kitchen in a big gingham apron, preparing breakfast. Mrs. Triplett was still in bed. Such a thing had never happened before within Georgina’s recollection.
“It’s the rheumatism in her back,” Belle reported. “It’s so bad she can’t lie still with any comfort, and she can’t move without groaning. So she’s sort of ‘between the de’il and the deep sea.’ And touchy is no name for it. She doesn’t like it if you don’t and she doesn’t like it if you do; but you can’t wonder when the pain’s so bad. It’s pretty near lumbago.”
Georgina, who had finished her dressing by tying the prism around her neck, was still burning with the desire which Uncle Darcy’s talk had kindled within her, to be a little comfort to everybody.
“Let me take her toast and tea up to her,” she begged. With that toast and tea she intended to pass along the good word Uncle Darcy had given her--“the line to live by.” But Tippy was in no humor to be adjured by a chit of a child to bear up and steer right onward. Such advice would have been coldly received just then even from her minister.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she exclaimed testily. “Bear up? Of course I’ll bear up. There’s nothing else _to_ do with rheumatism, but you needn’t come around with any talk of putting rainbows around it or me either.”
She gave her pillow an impatient thump with her hard knuckles.
“Deliver me from people who make it their business in life always to act cheerful no matter _what._ The Scripture itself says ’There’s a time to laugh and a time to weep, a time to mourn and a time to dance.’ When the weeping time comes I can’t abide either people or books that go around spreading cheerful sayings on everybody like salve!”
Tippy, lying there with her hair screwed into a tight little button on the top of her head, looked strangely unlike herself. Georgina descended to the kitchen, much offended. It hurt her feelings to have her good offices spurned in such a way. She didn’t care how bad anybody’s rheumatism was she muttured. “It was no excuse for saying such nasty things to people who were trying to be kind to them.”
Belle suggested presently that the customary piano practice be omitted that morning for fear it might disturb Aunt Maria, so when the usual little tasks were done Georgina would have found time dragging, had it not been for the night letter which a messenger boy brought soon after breakfast. Grandfather Shirley was better than she had expected to find him, Barby wired. Particulars would follow soon in a letter. It cheered Georgina up so much that she took a pencil and tablet of paper up into the willow tree and wrote a long account to her mother of the birthday happenings. What with the red-candled cake and the picture show and the afternoon in the boat it sounded as if she had had a very happy day. But mostly she wrote about the prism, and what Uncle Darcy had told her about the magic glass of Hope. When it was done she went in to Belle.
“May I go down to the post-office to mail this and stop on my way back at the Green Stairs and see if Richard can come and play with me?” she asked.