“I fancy he’ll carry away an equal contempt for yours. Was that your highest code of manners you were practising on him? As for social address—you’re right. He wasn’t around when they were handing that stuff out. He has never had his spine manicured!”
“Spine!” Mrs. MacDowell scoffed very gently. “What a delightful Franklin Street vocabulary you have acquired! As long as I care to remember, you have never been willing to listen to a word from me.”
“Well, Mother, you never said a word that appealed to me. That’s why.”
Freda rapped with her toes in an aggravating tattoo on the chair seat, and then began teetering back and forth in such a way that the front legs kept dropping noisily against the floor. Mrs. MacDowell worked on quietly for a few moments.
“Freda,” she said at length, without looking up, “I sincerely wish that you, some time or other, will gratify a long-cherished desire of mine by falling flat off that confounded chair.”
“And cracking my skull, I suppose,” added Freda, the meanwhile balancing skilfully on the two back legs. “Well, this is my favorite sport, and it’s worth a skull any time. Do you know, Mother, I’ve a good notion not to go back to Merlton this fall.”
Mrs. MacDowell did not at once reply.
“That is almost the brightest idea that has emerged from your skull since you came home,” she said presently, in a tone of sarcasm. “How would you propose to amuse yourself in Lockwood?”
“I could get a job as private secretary to Ted Courtney. Ted needs somebody to help him look after his money. I was talking to him on the street last night, and asked him if he could give me a job. He jumped right at the idea like a bulldog. Says he’s needed some one for a long time, and, I may say, he offers me a splendid proposition. I said I’d have to take a few days to consider it.”
Mrs. MacDowell gazed on Freda with the expression of one who has learned by experience to credit even the most preposterous of her daughter’s statements. “I trust,” she interrupted seriously, “that there is no truth in what you are saying.”