“That doesn't strike me as such a large order for complete happiness,” observed father, smiling at her.
Missy smiled back at him. In another these words might have savoured of irony, but Missy feared irony from her father less than from any other old person.
Father was a big, silent man but he was always kind and particularly lovable; and he “understood” better than most “old people.”
“What is the special merit of these white fox furs?” he went on, and something in the indulgent quality of his tone, something in the expression of his eyes, made hope stir timidly to birth in her bosom and rise to shine from her eyes.
But before she could answer, mother spoke. “I can tell you that. That flighty Hicks girl went by here this afternoon wearing some. That Summers boy who clerks in Pieker's grocery was with her. He once wanted Missy to go walking with him and I had to put my foot down. She doesn't seem to realize she's too young for such things. Her brown furs will do her for this season—and next season too!”
Mother put on a stern, determined kind of look, almost hard. Into the life of every woman who is a mother there comes a time when she learns, suddenly, that her little girl is trying not to be a little girl any longer but to become a woman. It is a hard moment for mothers, and no wonder that they seem unwarrantedly adamantine. Mrs. Merriam instinctively knew that wanting furs and wanting boys spelled the same evil. But Missy, who was fifteen instead of thirty-seven and whose emotions and desires were still as hazy and uncorrelated as they were acute, stared with bewildered hurt at this unjust harshness in her usually kind parent.
Then she turned large, pleading eyes upon her father; he had shown a dawning interest in the subject of white fox furs. But Mr. Merriam, now, seemed to have lost the issue of furs in the newer issue of boys.
“What's this about the Summers boy?” he demanded. “It's the first I've ever heard of this business.”
“He only wanted me to go walking, father. All the rest of the girls go walking with boys.” “Indeed! Well, you won't. Nor for a good many years!”
Such unexpected shortness and sharpness from father made her feel suddenly wretched; he was even worse than mother.