Not waiting to finish setting her kitchen in order, Susan ran up the back stairs to Keith's room.
"Well, your aunt is gone, an' I'm on,
An' here we are together.
We'll chuck our worries into pawn,
An' how do you like the weather?"
she greeted him gayly. "How about gettin' up? Come on! Such a lazy boy! Here it is away in the middle of the forenoon, an' you abed like this!"
But it was not to be so easy this time. Keith was not to be cajoled into getting up and dressing himself even to beat Susan's record. Steadfastly he resisted all efforts to stir him into interest or action; and a dismayed, disappointed Susan had to go downstairs in acknowledged defeat.
"But, land's sake, what could you expect?" she muttered to herself, after a sorrowful meditation before the kitchen fire. "You can't put a backbone into a jellyfish by jest showin' him the bone—an' that's what his aunt has made him—a flappy, transparallel jellyfish. Drat her! But I ain't goin' to give up. Not much I ain't!" And Susan attacked the little kitchen stove with a vigor that would have brought terror to the clinkers of a furnace fire pot.
Susan did not attempt again that day to get Keith up and dressed; and she gave him his favorite "pop-overs" for supper with a running fire of merry talk and jingles that contained never a reference to the unpleasant habit of putting on clothes, But the next morning, after she had given Keith his breakfast (not of toast and oatmeal) she suggested blithely that he get up and be dressed. When he refused she tried coaxing, mildly, then more strenuously. When this failed she tried to sting his pride by telling him she did not believe he could get up now, anyhow, and dress himself.
"All right, Susan, let it go that I can't. I don't want to, anyhow," sighed the boy with impatient weariness. "Say, can't you let a fellow alone?"
Susan drew a long breath and held it suspended for a moment. She had the air of one about to make a dreaded plunge.
"No, I can't let you alone, Keith," she replied, voice and manner now coldly firm.
"Why not? What's the use when I don't want to get up?"