“That sounds suspiciously like trying to be a Smart Aleck,” I retorted.
“It may sound that way, but it isn’t. You’re so mentally alive, I mean, that you’ve simply got to be slightly acrobatic. And it’s as natural, of course, as a child’s dancing.”
But Peter is wrong. I’ve been out of the world so long that I’ve a dread of impressing people as stupid, as being a clodhopper. And if trying hard not to be thought that is “topping the box,” I suppose I’m guilty.
“You are also not without vanity,” Peter judicially continued. “But every naturally beautiful woman has a right to that.” And I proved Peter’s contention by turning shell-pink even under my sunburn and feeling a warm little runway of pleasure creep up through my carcass, for the homeliest old prairie-hen that ever made a pinto shy, I suppose, loves to be told that she’s beautiful.
Peter, of course, is a conscienceless liar, but I can’t help liking him, and he’ll always nest warm in the ashes of my heart....
There’s one thing I must do, as soon as I have the chance, and that is get in to a dentist and have my teeth attended to. And now that I’m so much thinner I want a new and respectable pair of corsets. I’ve been studying my face in the glass, and I can see, now, what an awful Ananias Peter really is. Struthers, by the way, observed me in the midst of that inspection, and, if I’m not greatly mistaken, indulged in a sniff. To her, I suppose, I’m one of those vain creatures who fall in love with themselves as a child and perpetuate, thereby, a life romance!
Saturday the Twenty-sixth
Coming events do not cast their shadows before them. I was busy in the kitchen this morning, making marmalade out of what was left of Peter’s oranges and contentedly humming Oh, Dry Those Tears when the earthquake that shook the world from under my feet occurred.
The Twins had been bathed and powdered and fed and put out in their sleeping-box, and Dinkie was having his morning nap, and Struthers was busy at the sewing-machine, finishing up the little summer shirts for Poppsy and Pee-Wee which I’d begun to make out of their daddy’s discarded B. V. D.’s. It was a glorious morning with a high-arching pale blue sky and little baby-lamb cloudlets along the sky-line and the milk of life running warm and rich in the bosom of the sleeping earth. And I was bustling about in my apron of butcher’s linen, after slicing oranges on my little maple-wood carving-slab until the house was aromatic with them, when the sound of a racing car-engine smote on my ear. I went to the door with fire in my eye and the long-handled preserving spoon in my hand, ready to call down destruction on the pinhead who’d dare to wake my kiddies.