“Perhaps,” said Jean, who knew that Cora was apt to make mountains out of molehills, “they were just looking to see if they were stamped or properly addressed. You know they have to bring them back to us sometimes for reasons like that.”
“I don’t know,” returned Cora. “Things are queer and different this year. I’d like to, but I can’t tell you why.”
“Do tell us,” begged Henrietta.
“No, I can’t. I promised not to.”
“There’s one thing,” said Jean, “that surprises me. Doctor Rhodes isn’t a bit like a school teacher. And when he talks to us in the school room as he sometimes does when he has anything to announce like new rules or a lecture or a concert in the village, he often uses the wrong word or mispronounces a word, as if—well, as if he weren’t used to making speeches in very good English.”
“I think he gets rattled,” said little Jane Pool, sagely.
“Somehow,” said Marjory, “I don’t exactly like Doctor Rhodes. I don’t exactly believe in him.”
“I don’t quite like him, either,” declared Henrietta, who had washed her wonderful mop of hair and was drying it with a large bathtowel. “I’m surprised at my Grandmother for saying such nice things about him. When there are visitors he seems so oily and so smooth; and it seems to me that he is extra polite to those Miller girls—all the world uses their father’s soap, you know—but when he asks Sallie to do errands he doesn’t even say please. And Mrs. Rhodes is always gliding about like the ghost of Hamlet’s Father. She looks as if she were listening with all her features. But she never says a thing to us, even when she catches us slipping around through the corridors after lights are out.”
“I’m glad she doesn’t,” said Marjory. “She looks all the things she doesn’t say.”
“After all,” said Jean, sagely, “they might be a lot worse.”