"There is one girl," sobbed Claire, with her arms round her father's neck and her head on his dear, kindly breast, "that I know I shall slap or throw something at if I stay. She has red hair and very white skin, with little freckles all over it, and she is quite fat. She wears a different dress every day, and it's always something handsome but queer to look at.... I heard her tell another girl that all her clothes came from Paris. She brings two bananas for lunch, and long cakes spread over with chocolate, that spirt out something soft and yellow, like custard, when she bites into them, and soil her fingers.... Well, Father, that girl sits near me, and she is always making fun of me behind my back, and whispering things about me to the others that make them burst out laughing and watch me from the corners of their eyes.... Of course this is only at recess, but at all times, Father, I can feel how they are thinking that I have no right, no business among them.... And perhaps I haven't. Oh, Father, I want to be a lady as much as you want me to be one, but ... isn't there some other way of learning how? If you'll only take me from that dreadful place, I'll ... I'll go anywhere else you please!"
Indignant, yet pierced with sympathy for his darling, Twining promised her that she should go back no more to Mrs. Arcularius's.
Claire kissed him, and then put her wet cheek against his. But an instant later she lifted her head. She had thought of her mother, who was paying one of their fellow-boarders a visit that evening, and at this very moment was stating to her hostess, with a sort of saturnine braggadocio, that Claire's new school "ought to be a regular first-class one, and no mistake, for it was going to cost a regular first-class kind of a price."
"But Mother?" said Claire, in anxious query, "what will she say, Father?"
"Never mind what your mother will say, my dear," answered Twining, in his gentle undertone. And Claire remembered a certain night in One-Hundred-and-Twelfth Street,—a night which she had never really forgotten, as we know, and whose incident was fated sharply to revisit her through many an eventful year yet unlived.
But Claire's tears were scarcely dried before she regretted the promise won from her father, and asked him to revoke it. Her young face looked pale and resolute as she did so. Her brief burst of weakness had passed. The ambition to seize and hold any near means of advancement was already no weak impulse in her youthful being. As it afterward struck the great key-note of her life, and became the source of every discord or harmony which that life was to contain, so now its force had begun to stir secret centres and to prelude the steady influence which must soon impel and sway her.
"Let me try a little while longer, Father," she said, standing near him and holding his hand. Her head was slightly thrown backward; her mouth was grave and firm. She was so slender and fragile that this solemn mood might have made one think, as he regarded her, of a lily that had found some art to cast aside its droop, while all its lightsome traits of stem or petal still remained.
"Yes, I mean it, Father," she continued, with a very deep seriousness. "I have begun to climb the hill, and I shan't get tired so soon and sit down to rest. You told me I must not, and I won't. I do not want to sit down at all until I shall reach the top.... But you can help me, if you will; you can make it easier for me." She pressed his hand. "Will you make it easier, Father?" she said.
"Yes!" he answered. He spoke the word without knowing what she meant. He could have spoken no other at this moment, with her eyes fixed on him like that, and her clinging hand tense about his own. He loved her so well that he would have faced any peril to save her from any harm. She was his cheer, his pride, his hope, his happiness. He thought her the most beautiful little girl in all the world. He had forgotten to tell himself that her mother made her look a guy in seeking to make her more pretty. To him she was always his innocent, blameless idol—his Claire, whom he had named after his own dead mother, known only in the idealizing years of early childhood. He never looked into her face without feeling his heart beat a trifle quicker. He had been in love with her from the time when he first held her, a new-born baby, and he was in love with her still. It was a love which had the best glow and thrill of those dramatic passions that make our tales, our tragedies, and our epics, only that by absence of the one fevered sentiment knit and kinned with these, it so gained in purity and unselfishness as to strip from all hint of over-praise the holier epithet of divine.
Naturally enough came Twining's afterthought.