Jeanne had heard this story the night that she had had her dinner with her grandfather. She was supposed to be eating in the breakfast-room with her cousins; but when Maggie had cleared Mr. Huntington's little table, that evening, preparatory to bringing in his tray, Jeanne had said: "Bring enough for me, too, Maggie. I'm going to stay right here. You'll let me, won't you, grand-daddy?"
"I'll invite you," was the response. "I don't know why I didn't think of doing it long ago."
You see, whenever the Huntingtons entertained at dinner, as they frequently did, the children were banished to the breakfast-room. Between Pearl's snippishness, Clara's snubbing, and Harold's teasing, these were usually unhappy occasions for Jeanne. And generally the three young Huntingtons quarreled with one another. Besides, with no elders to restrain him, Harold was decidedly rude and "grabby."
"I think," said Jeanne, after one particularly uproarious meal during which Harold had plastered Pearl's face with mashed potato and poured water down Jeanne's back, "that I've learned more good manners from Harold than from anybody else—his are so very bad that it makes me want nice ones."
After the meal with her grandfather was finished, he showed her where to find an old photograph album, hidden behind the books in his bookcase.
"There," said he, opening it at a page containing four small pictures. "This is your mother when she was six months old. She was three or four years old in this next one, and here is one at the age of twelve. She was seventeen when this last one was taken."
"Is this all there are?" asked Jeanne, who had studied the four little pictures earnestly. "Of her, I mean?"
"Yes, only those four. Young people didn't have cameras in those days, you know."
"Keep the place for me," said Jeanne, returning the book to her grandfather's knee. "I'll be back in just a second."
She returned very quickly with the miniature of Elizabeth Huntington Duval that she had been longing to show to her grandfather.