“It won’t worry your father half as much to hear Bram called Bram as it’ll worry poor little Bram later on to be called Abraham. That boy’s all right, Josh. He’s the best firework you’ve turned out of this factory for many a day. So, don’t let Achsah and Thyrza spoil him.”
“They try their best to be strict, mamma.”
“I’m talking about their physic, idiot. They’re a pair of pasty-faced old maids, and it’s unnatural and unpleasant to let them be for ever messing about with a capital boy like Bram. Let them physic young Caleb. He’ll be no loss to the world. Bram might be.”
Joshua threw his eyes up to Heaven and left his unaccountable mother to her own unaccountable thoughts. He often wondered why his father had never had her shut up in an asylum. For some time now she had been collecting outrageous odds and ends of furniture for her room to which none of the family was allowed access except by special invitation. Ever since Caterina had run away old Mrs. Fuller had had a room of her own. But she had been content with an ordinary bed at first. Now she had procured a monstrous foreign affair all gilt and Cupids and convolutions. If Joshua had been his father he would have taken steps to prevent such a waste of her allowance. He fancied that the old man must be breaking up to allow such furniture to enter the house.
Not long after the conversation between Joshua and his mother about Bram, a travelling circus arrived at Brigham on a Sunday morning. The Peculiar Children of God shivered at such a profanation of the Sabbath, and Apostle Fuller—in these days a truly patriarchal figure with his long white food-bespattered beard—preached from the marble chair on the vileness of these sacrilegious mountebanks and the pestilent influence any circus must have on a Christian town. In spite of this denunciation the chief apostle’s own wife dared to take her elder grandchild on Monday to view from the best seats obtainable the monstrous performance. They sat so near the ring that the sawdust and the tan were scattered over them by the horses’ hoofs. Little Bram, his chin buried in the worn crimson velvet of the circular barrier, gloated in an ecstasy on the paradisiacal vision.
“Brava! Bravissima!” old Mrs. Fuller cried loudly when a demoiselle of the haute école took an extra high fence. “Brava! Bravissima!” she cried when an equestrienne in pink tights leapt through four blazing hoops and regained without disarranging one peroxide curl the shimmering back of her piebald steed.
“Oh, grandmamma,” little Bram gasped when he bade her good night, “can I be a clown when I’m a man?”
“The difficulty is not to be a clown when one is a man,” she answered grimly.
“What do you mean, grandmamma?”
“Ah, what?” she sighed.