“Eh? Iss it not enough plain to you? Well, not wanted—that iss what it means then.”
“Not wanted,—not wanted.” Bobby repeated the words over and over to himself, not quite satisfied yet. They sounded bad—oh, very; but perhaps Olga had got them wrong. She was not a United States person. It would be easy for another kind of a person to get things wrong. Still—“not wanted”—they certainly sounded very plain. And they meant—Bobby gave a faint gasp, and suddenly his thoughts turned dizzily round and round one terrible pivot—“not wanted.” He sprang away out of the nurse’s hands and darted down the long, bright hall to his mother’s room. She was being dressed for a ball, and the room was pitilessly light. She sat at a table with a little mirror before her. Suddenly another face appeared in it with hers—a little, scarred, red face, stamped deep with childish woe. The contrast appalled her.
Bobby was not looking into the glass, but into her beautiful face.
“Is that what it stands for?” he demanded, breathlessly. “She said so. Did she lie?”
“Robert! For Heaven’s sake, child, stand away! You are tearing my lace. What are you doing here? Why are you not in bed?”
“Does it stand for that?” he persisted.
“Does what stand for what? Look, you are crushing my dress. Stand farther off. Don’t you see, child?”
“She said the U in the middle o’ my name stood for Not Wanted. Does it? Tell me quick. Does it?”
The contrast of the two faces in her mirror hurt her like a blow. It brought back all the disappointment and the wounded vanity of that time, six years ago, when they had shown her the tiny, disfigured face of her son.
“No, it wasn’t that. I morember now. It was Unwelcome, but it means that. Is the middle o’ my name Unwelcome—what?”