“I am hurrying. I’m hurrying as much as ever I can. Can’t you see I’m hurrying?” Laura, badgered beyond endurance, jabbed her hat-pins through her hat and made heatedly for the door.
But she turned again, my tender-conscience Laura, to say pleasantly—
“You’ve got the paper, haven’t you? Good-bye, Gran’papa!”
“Goodbaye,” said Gran’papa, hunched in his chair like a malicious old eagle. His shoulders shook as the door closed and he gave his dry, birdlike chuckle.
“Goodbaye,” repeated Gran’papa with relish, and returned to his Times.
But Laura, edging along young cornfields in Justin’s wake, had been stirred to expostulations.
“I do think you might have backed me. Gran’papa’s impossible sometimes. It’s absolute pedantry. And he doesn’t mind who’s there. He says I slur my words! I don’t, do I? As if I could help it, anyhow.”
“Adenoids, I expect,” said Justin sympathetically. “You ought to have ’em seen to,” and was surprised that Laura was silent for the next few minutes.
Not that he objected. Laura listened so well that he would have described her as a brilliant talker; but when she did talk she was always a little too quick for him. She had had, indeed, to break herself of a tendency to finish his sentences for him; for he never thought ahead, but when a question was asked him, or an aspect presented, he would always pause, in his unhurried fashion, to view the matter from all points of the compass before proceeding on his conversational itinerary, and so was apt to come from a totally unexpected quarter to his impeccable conclusions. Indeed he presented his truisms with such an air of having discovered them all by himself that nine out of ten people thought him original; while the tenth—laughed and loved him. His solemnity, you see, to those discerning ones, was—and would be all his life—so disarmingly the seriousness of the small boy who, on one of his mother’s at-home days, had greeted a clerical stranger encountered on the doorstep with—
“How do you do? I’m Justin Cloud. Would you like to see my football?” Then, graciously—“I keep it in the pantry.”