With a rough flannel and blue mottled soap she scoured Poppy's body and face as if it had been the face of a rock; scrubbing and rubbing until the skin crackled like a fire beneath her vigorous hand. Later came a scraping down with a bath towel made of something of the same fibre as a door-mat. At last Poppy crept to her bed, her eyes like pin-points in her head from the scalding of the strong soap; her hair strained back from her sore, glazed face and plaited as tightly as possible into two pig-tails behind her ears.
On such nights she was far enough from the beauty she so much coveted. To herself she appeared hideous—hideous. It gave her pain to look at herself in the glass. And she believed that her aunt made her hideous with malignant intent. Her cousins had their hair loosely plaited, and it hung nicely over their faces, and they had frills to their nightgowns. Poppy's nightgown of unbleached calico had a tight narrow neck-band that nearly strangled her when buttoned with a linen button the size of a small saucer.
Those were the nights when a thousand devils ate at her heart and fought within her, and she knew she could never be beautiful. She would lie awake for hours, just to loathe her aunt and concoct tortures for her. In imagination she cut slits in that hated body and filled them with salt and mustard, or anything that would burn; dug sharp knives into the cruel heart; saw the narrow hard face lying on the floor and beat into it with a hammer until it was red, red, red—and everything was red.
"Scorpion! Scorpion!" she would rave.
Worn out at last and half asleep she would choke and groan and bite her pillow, thinking she had her enemy under her hands, until her cousins in their big bed across the room would call out:
"Ma! I wish you would come and speak to Miss Poppy here. She's calling you a 'scorpion'!"
The chances were that Mrs. Kennedy, in no pleasant temper after all her exertions, would fly into the room, tear down the bedclothes, and administer two or three stinging slaps on Poppy's bare body, crying out upon her for an ungrateful, vile-tempered little fagot.
"You want a sjambok round you, that's what you want, my lady, and you'll get it one of these days. I shan't go on with you in this patient way for ever."
"I won't have a sjambok used on a child in my house," Uncle Bob would mutter in the dining-room, asserting himself in this one matter at least.
But Clara and Emily would jeer from their beds, calling her Miss Poppy in fine derision.