“Really. You can see the window through the place that was left when we had the dead walnut tree cut down. She looks up and down the street, but mostly at father’s and over here. Sometimes she forgets to put out the light in her room, and there she is, spying away for all the world to see!”
However, Fanny made no effort to observe this spectacle, but continued her creaking. “I’ve always thought her a very good woman,” she said primly.
“So she is,” Isabel agreed. “She’s a good, friendly old thing, a little too intimate in her manner, sometimes, and if her poor old opera-glasses afford her the quiet happiness of knowing what sort of young man our new cook is walking out with, I’m the last to begrudge it to her! Don’t you want to come and look at her, George?”
“What? I beg your pardon. I hadn’t noticed what you were talking about.”
“It’s nothing,” she laughed. “Only a funny old lady—and she’s gone now. I’m going, too—at least, I’m going indoors to read. It’s cooler in the house, but the heat’s really not bad anywhere, since nightfall. Summer’s dying. How quickly it goes, once it begins to die.”
When she had gone into the house, Fanny stopped rocking, and, leaning forward, drew her black gauze wrap about her shoulders and shivered. “Isn’t it queer,” she said drearily, “how your mother can use such words?”
“What words are you talking about?” George asked.
“Words like ‘die’ and ‘dying.’ I don’t see how she can bear to use them so soon after your poor father—” She shivered again.
“It’s almost a year,” George said absently, and he added: “It seems to me you’re using them yourself.”
“I? Never!”