“They are very good eggs indeed, and well boiled,” the new man answered. She loved the way in which he conversed with her.
“Ought we to give her some idea?” asked the doctor in a low voice.
“I would wait until she asks,” said the other.
But Paul’s child never asked. Once or twice she remarked that Daddy was away longer than usual “vis time,” but he had never been a very steadily recurrent phenomenon in her life, and soon her little brain, filled with new impressions, had forgotten that he ever used to come back.
There were many new impressions. A great deal was happening nowadays. Every morning something different, every day new people going and coming. Aunt Marietta, Auntie Madeleine, Uncle George from Cleveland, whom she’d seen only once or twice before, and Great-Aunt Hollister, whom she knew very well and feared as well as she knew her. After a time even the husbands began to appear, the husbands she had seen so rarely; Aunt Marietta’s husband, and Aunt Madeleine’s—fat, bald Mr. Lowder, who smelled of tobacco and soap and took her up on his lap—as much as he had—and gave her a big round dollar and kissed her behind her ear and smiled at her very kindly and held her very close. He said he liked little girls, and he wished Auntie Madeleine would get him one some day for a Christmas present. She informed him, filled with admiration at the extent of her own knowledge, that he couldn’t get a Christmas present some day, but only just Christmas Day.
Mostly, however, they paid no attention to her, these many aunts and uncles who came and went. And, oddly enough, Uncle Marius always shut the door to Muvver’s room when they came, and wouldn’t let them, no matter how much they wanted to, go in and see Muvver, who was, she gathered, very sick. Ariadne didn’t see, really, why they came at all, since they couldn’t see Muvver and they certainly never so much as looked at ’Stashie, dear darling ’Stashie—more of a comfort these queer days than ever before—and they never, never spoke to the new man, who came and went as though nobody knew he was there. They would look right at him and never see him. Everything was very hard for a little girl to understand, and she dared ask no questions.
Everybody seemed to be very angry, and yet not at her. Indeed, she took the most prodigious care to avoid doing anything naughty lest she concentrate on herself this now widely diffused disapprobation. Never in her life had she tried so hard to be good, but nobody paid the least attention to her—nobody but the new man and ’Stashie, and they weren’t the angry ones. The others stood about in groups in corners, talking in voices that started in to be low and always got loud before they stopped. Ariadne added several new words to her vocabulary at this time, from hearing them so constantly repeated. When her dolls were bad now, she shook them and called them “Indecent! indecent!” and asked them, with as close an imitation as she could manage, of Great-Aunt Hollister’s tone, “What do you suppose people are thinking! What do you suppose people are thinking!” Or she knocked them into a corner and said “Shocking! Shocking!”
One day she stopped Uncle Marius, hurrying past her up the stairs, and asked him: “What are you thinking of, Uncle Marius?”
“What am I thinking of? What do you mean?” he repeated, his face and eyes twitching the way they did when he couldn’t understand something right off.
“Why, Auntie Madeleine keeps asking everybody all the time, ‘What can the doctor be thinking of?’ I just wondered.”