“Maybe so. It’ll do her good. If she’d taken my advice she’d be tucked in her pretty ivory bed at El Trono de Tolerancia this minute, and I’d be turning flapjacks at the fireplace. But, no—I don’t know anything! Nobody listens to me!”
“To be quite frank with you,” said the doctor, “I’m a little glad too that things have turned out like this. I hated to see Mrs. Reemy sink fifty thousand dollars in opal mines, so I offered to go in with her. So did Andy. But all three of us have about as much need for an opal mine as we have for two noses. Just the same, I was willing to put my shoulder under a third of the proposition to please Mrs. Reemy and help her out with her great adventure. But now, as I said, I’m rather satisfied that it has turned out as it has.”
“You like to see the fire flash in her brown eyes when she talks about her big adventure, don’t you, Doctor?” Mary Temple shot at him.
Dr. Shonto laughed, though by no means mirthfully. “What do you mean by that?” he asked.
Mary’s faded eyes looked at him steadily, and the thin nostrils of her long nose twitched squirrel-like. “Oh, you know what I mean,” she lashed out. “I can read the signs. Well, I never was a body to hold my tongue. I say what I think. And now I’m thinking that I’d rather see you get her than your friend Mr. Jerome. He may be all right, so far as men go, but he’s too much like her to suit me. Too young and rattle-headed. You could tone her down a bit. But Jerome’ll get her—that’s plain. She’s in love with him this minute. But it won’t last, Doctor. There’ll be a divorce if they marry. Then you can step in. But for my part I’d rather see her single.”
“I think,” said Shonto soberly, “that in your youth you must have sung an old ditty that comes to my mind—
“What are the little girls made out of?
What are the little girls made out of?
Sugar and spice and everything nice—
That’s what the little girls are made out of.