Phœbe halted, wide of eyes and mouth. Son? That meant marriage—a husband!
“My mother-in-law takes care of him,” explained the drug-store girl. (But of course she was a girl no longer. She was a grown woman—if she was married and had a baby.)
“He’s nice,” said Phœbe; “—like you.”
After that she often went with her father to have ice-cream sodas at the drug-store. And always, in his hearing, she asked after the baby and after the baby’s father, and she rather prided herself on having carried out this particular case of thwarting very well indeed.
But with the young drug-store woman out of the way, she still had no peace of mind. For now there rose up in her day-dreams the vision of a wholly imaginary step-mother. The visionary figure was no longer nebulous. And it was forbidding. Friends of her own age, school-life, even the sympathetic companionship of a woman she could have trusted, would have driven the vision from her thoughts. But in that adult household, where all of her little confidences were given to no one, her morbidity grew until the figure she had imagined came to seem to be alive.
It met her at quick, dim turns in the big lower hall, or on the dark stair-landing. It lurked in her clothes-closet, usurping the place of the Other Thing, which now disappeared. Worst of all, she could imagine the figure in her father’s room!
Curiously enough, it bore no likeness to any of the screen step-mothers Phœbe had seen. This imaginary step-mother was tall, bony, heavy-shouldered and long-armed, with sullen eyes and graying brown hair combed straight back to show a wrinkled brow. What the rest of the face was like, Phœbe never imagined. It was always the brow and the eyes that caught her fleet glance as she hurried by.
That her father would scarcely choose such a woman to be his second wife, somehow never occurred to Phœbe. Had not Botts, poor liquor-soddened, but kindly, soul, acquired Mrs. Botts when unquestionably he did not want her? Such things happened to widowers and divorced men. They were matrimonially helpless. And the vision that Phœbe’s fear called up was of all things formidable, and overbearing, yet silent—with the silence that means power.
Phœbe trembled when she thought of her, and at those certain dim places where the figure met her she felt an awful prickling of the skin.
Her face grew gaunt. Her nose seemed pinched. Her cheeks lost some of their color. So that Uncle Bob talked about a tonic.