“If you’ll excuse me,” she said, in an aloof voice, “I’m going up to bed early. Really, this Boston trip has quite fagged me out.”
She went away to her room—the room next to the green and golden nest where Caroline had lain so many nights, and been so happy. Whether she read or wrote or merely sat with her own thoughts, nobody knows. At any rate she didn’t sleep as she had said she should.
About eleven o’clock that same night when Aunt Eunice, in her soft dressing-sack of gray and golden crêpe, with a lacy cap on her white hair, sat propped up in her bed, reading (if you’ll believe it!) “Alice in the Looking Glass,” there came a knock at her door. When Aunt Eunice called: “Come in!” Penelope herself trailed into the room.
Penelope had on the lavender dressing-gown that Caroline loved her in. Her face was quite pale, and her eyes looked big, but rather starlike. She came and stood at the foot of the big mahogany bed, with its four pillars, and facing Aunt Eunice, spoke breathlessly:
“Mother, I wouldn’t for the world stand in the way of what would give you happiness. After all, this little Caroline comes of good honest Longmeadow blood on her father’s side, and her mother seems to have been more than all right. And the child is gifted—no doubt about that. You should hear Woleski rave over her. So you go ahead and adopt her, Mother! Don’t mind me. I’m sure I shan’t ever raise the slightest objection.”
Aunt Eunice looked down at the passage she had been reading in her book. It was the place where Alice reaches the lovely garden, where she wishes to be, simply by walking away from it. Aunt Eunice thought very highly of “Alice in the Looking Glass.” She called it the work of a philosopher, and an excellent rule of conduct. She closed the book carefully, over her finger that still kept the place.
“Adopting a child isn’t like adopting a puppy or a kitten,” she spoke musingly. “It’s a responsibility, and one shouldn’t undertake it, unless one is pretty sure of seeing it through. Now I’m seventy-one, and when I go, there’s no way of my providing for Caroline. Our property is trusteed, as you know, and when I’m done with it, it’s absolutely yours, to do with as you please.”
They looked at each other, the two of them. Then Penelope cried passionately:
“But I won’t adopt her, Mother. I can’t! After what I’ve said of the Meadows children—after what every one has heard me say—all my life. My pride wouldn’t let me!
“Oh, Penelope!” The words on Aunt Eunice’s lips were just a breath of pain.