"How is she doing, really, about—well, er—this private self-improvement association of hers?" The doctor's smile was eager and quizzical. "I've been away so much, and I've seen so little of her for months past—how is she doing?"
"Splendidly! She's a daily marvel to me, she's so patient and painstaking. Oh, of course, she hasn't learned so very much—yet. But she's so alert and earnest, and she watches everything so! Indeed, if it weren't really so pitiful and so tragic, it would be perfectly funny and absurd. The things she does and says—the things she asks me to teach her! Feverishly and systematically she's set herself to becoming 'swell' and 'grand.'"
"Swell! Grand!"
"Oh, yes, I know," laughed the lady, answering his shuddering words and gesture. "And—we've nearly eliminated those expressions from our vocabulary now. Burke didn't like them either, she says."
"I can imagine not," observed the doctor dryly.
"Of course all the teaching in the world isn't going to accomplish the thing she wants," went on Mrs. Thayer, a little soberly. "I might teach her till doomsday that clothes, jewels, grooming, and perfume don't make the lady; and unless she learns by intuition and absorption what does make the lady, she'll be little better off than she was before. But she puts me now through a daily catechism until sometimes I am nearly wild. 'Do ladies do this?' 'Do ladies do that?' she queries at every turn, so that I am almost ready to fly off into a veritable orgy of slang and silliness, just from sheer contrariety. I can tell you, Frank, this attempting to teach the intangible, evanescent thing I'm trying to teach Helen Denby isn't very easy. If you think it is, you try it yourself."
"Heaven forbid!" shrugged the man. "But I'll risk you, Edith. But, tell me—does she help you any, in any way? Do you think you can—keep her, for a while?"
"Keep her? Of course I shall keep her! Do you suppose I'd turn that child adrift now? Besides, she's a real help to me with the children. And I know—and she knows—that in helping me she is helping herself, and helping Dorothy Elizabeth—'Betty' she calls her now. We're getting along beautifully. We—"
There came the sound of hurried steps, then the sudden wide flinging of the door, and the appearance of a breathless young woman.
"Oh, Mrs. Thayer, they said the doctor had come, and—" Helen Denby stopped short, her abashed eyes going from one to the other of the expressive faces before her. "Oh, I—I beg your pardon," she faltered. "I hadn't ought to have burst in like this. Ladies don't. You said yesterday that ladies never did. But I—I—doctor, you went to—to Dalton?" she appealed to the man.