"No. Barney never talks to anybody but men, he's so bashful. He was telling another man why he liked my father. They were reeling a net."
"Where were you?"
"Behind them, peeling potatoes. I didn't know then that it wasn't polite to listen."
"You poor little savage."
"I don't mind," assured Jeanne, "when you call me a savage; but when Harold does, I feel like one."
Jeanne had been warned never to mention her mother in her grandfather's presence; and she had meant not to. But by this time, you have surely guessed that Jeanne, with no one else to whom she could talk freely, was apt to unbottle herself, as it were, whenever she found her grandfather in a listening mood. She was naturally a good deal of a chatterbox; but, like many another little chatterbox, preferred a sympathetic listener. Sometimes, as just now, she spoke of her mother without remembering that she was a forbidden subject. But now, some of the questions that she had been longing to ask, thronged to her lips. Her grandfather was so very gentle with her—Oh, if she only dared!
"What are you thinking about?" asked Mr. Huntington, after a long silence. "That is a very valuable picture and you are looking a hole right through it."
"I was wondering," said Jeanne, touching her grandfather's hand, timidly, "if you wouldn't be willing to tell me something about my mother. Nobody ever has. What she was like when she was little, I mean. When she was just thirteen and a half. Did she ever look even a tiny little scrap like me?"
"Yes," replied her grandfather, quite calmly, "you are like her. Not so much in looks as in other ways. You are darker and your bones are smaller, I think; but you move and speak like her, sometimes; and you, too, are bright and quick. And some part of your face is like hers; but I don't know whether it's your brow or your chin. Now you may clean my glasses for me and hunt up my book; I think James must have moved it. It's time you were changing your dress for dinner."
After that, Jeanne learned a number of things about her mother. That she had loved flowers when she was just a tiny baby, that pink was her favorite color. That she had liked cats and peppermint and people. That she was very impulsive, often doing the deed first, the thinking afterwards. And yes, her impulses had almost always been kind. Once (Jeanne's grandfather so far forgot his grievance against his only daughter as to chuckle softly at the remembrance of the childish prank) she had felt so sorry for a hungry tramp that the cook had turned away, that the moment cook's back was turned Bessie had, at the risk of being severely burned, pulled a huge crock of baked beans from the oven, wrapped a thick towel about it, slipped outside, and thrust it upon the tramp. The tramp had been burned; and they had had to send for a policeman, in order to get his bad language off the premises.