She compromised on a rubber ball. It was an inspiration! The moment she stepped upon the front porch, here was Uncle Bob, dragging the lawn-mower behind him. She explained that she had spent every cent she had at the drug-store. At any other time she would have hesitated to confess that even to Uncle Bob. But now she was suddenly indifferent even about what he thought.
And Uncle Bob, seeing her cheeks so pink and her eyes so full of fire, dropped the handle of the lawn-mower as if it were red-hot, and emptied one pocket of its silver. “God bless me!” he cried. “A rubber ball’s a great idea! And if you see anything else you like——”
Phœbe took the silver and was off like a shot. She knew the store that carried toys. She went without a pause to the toy-counter. There were other things that she liked,—as Uncle Bob had suggested—plenty of them. But for them she had no time. She bought the ball,—a large, gun-metal affair with a ridge around it like an Equator. She paid for it with a proud air, not even deigning to look at the clerk. No, she did not care to have it wrapped. And even while the man was sending away to make change for the half dollar she had given him, she proceeded to bounce the ball.
She bounced it all the way home, not taking her eyes from it. She ran; she skipped. For her purpose, the ball was precisely as good as the best dog would have been. As she played, she knew people were passing her on the sidewalk; or from porch or lawn were watching her pass. But she was completely absorbed.
After that, every day for many days she went at least once to the drug-store. And she bounced the ball both ways!
CHAPTER IX
Now came the beginning of what was like a new era of life for Phœbe—an era in which, more keenly than ever before, she was to understand, and—to suffer. Up to now she had not by any means been indifferent to the things that touched her own existence. And how she had loved and hated, joyed and sorrowed, with her enthralling favorites of the screen! But the time was come when she was to awaken to depths and heights of feeling—depths and heights all the more strikingly contrasted because her imagination was film-trained; she was to regard herself as the central figure in a heart drama that seemed countless reels long.
And about her, who—with her mother away—who was to take counsel with her, to sympathize, even to guess one small part of all that which surged through her young heart?
It was the great pipe-organ in Uncle John’s church that had most to do with her sudden emotional awakening, with her realization that something really momentous had come into her life. Weeks before she had started to school at Miss Simpson’s, the church organ had moved her. In New York, at one of the great temples dedicated to moving-pictures, she had often listened to the boom of just such a glorious instrument—listened with calm interest and pleasure, her hand clasped lovingly in her mother’s. And the church organ had not failed to recall to her the theatre, and those sweet hours that, alas, she had never fully appreciated.
But the first Sunday following Genevieve Finnegan’s visit! The pipe-organ stirred her cruelly. It spoke her own tragedy—it told the story of her broken, bankrupt home.