“Oh, Madeline!” came in horror-struck chorus at this point.
“Well,” Madeline admitted blandly, “I’m willing to confide to friends that at present my humble effort looks to me like the play of the year—and I’m fairly stage-wise already. Dick Blake used to advise all the aspiring dramatic critics he knew to take me along to their big first nights, because I can always tell by instinct what the audience is saying to itself. I’m a perfect mirror of public opinion. If I still believe in my play after I’ve been ’round a little I shall see Miss Dwight and her manager. After that——” Madeline shrugged her shoulders, and confided irrelevantly to the resident B. C. A.’s, who had come down to see the travelers off, that she wanted a black velvet hat with a white feather.
“And I’m going to have it, what’s more,” she ended. “I wrote dad, and he just said, ‘It’s lucky you don’t want two white feathers, now isn’t it?’ And he sent along a munificent check.”
Which proved, Betty said, that genius is not incompatible with frivolous-mindedness.
Jim sniffled manfully on their arrival, and his carefully marshaled “features” diverted Eleanor beautifully, especially after she had been up to Harding once to see Rafael, who, after he began to mend, progressed with amazing rapidity on the road to recovery. Because she had dreaded seeing him, she was relieved to get the meeting over, and much more relieved to find the boy so completely changed. As soon as it could be managed he had been moved to a hospital, and the new atmosphere, supplemented by good care and kindness, had done wonders for him. Before he was well enough to leave, Mr. Thayer declared, Rafael would be completely Americanized.
He greeted Eleanor with a frank smile above his big bandages.
“I awful silly boy,” he said, holding out a thin hand to her. “I guess you want laugh at me. I guess you tink I know not how gran’ you live in this country. Now I know. I know two, tree nurse-lady and many visitor-lady, looka like you. I like to live here always. I hope I get well awful slow.”
But, when Eleanor had delivered Jim’s message about Rafael’s going, as soon as he was strong enough, to a fine trade-school in Philadelphia, he changed his mind.
“Den I hope I get well awful fast. Before I get old, I know how all de wheels in dis world go round, mebbe. I think you be mad at me, and now you do me dis great big splendor.”
“Oh, no, I wasn’t ever ‘mad’ at you,” Eleanor explained, “only sorry you were so silly, and dreadfully frightened when you were so ill the first week.”