It was to Bobby that she went for advice when the standards of Houghtonsville and the Alley clashed; and it was to Bobby that she went for sympathy when grievous mismanagement of the knives and forks or of the folded square of cloth brought disaster to herself and tears to her mother’s eyes. She earnestly desired to—as she expressed it to Bobby—“come up to the scratch and walk straight”; and it was to Bobby that she looked for aid and counsel.
“You see, you can tell just what ’tis ails me,” she argued earnestly, as the two sat in their favorite perch in the apple tree. “You don’t know Patty and the Whalens, ‘course, but you do know folks just like ’em; and mother—don’t you see?—she knows only the kind that lives here, and she—she don’t understand. But you know both kinds, and you can tell where ’tis that I ain’t like ’em here. And I want to be like ’em, Bobby, I do, truly. They’re just bang-up—I mean, beautiful folks,” she corrected hastily. “And mother’s so good to me! She’s just——”
Margaret stopped suddenly. A new thought seemed to have come to her.
“Bobby,” she cried with sharp abruptness, “did you ever know any husbands that was—good?”
“‘Husbands’? ‘Good’? What do ye mean?”
“Did you ever know any that was good, I mean that didn’t beat their wives and bang ’em ‘round? Did you, Bobby?”
Bobby laughed. He lifted his chin quizzically, and gazed down from the lofty superiority of his fourteen years.
“Sure, an’ ain’t ye beginnin’ sort o’ early ter worry about husbands?” he teased. “But, mebbe you’ve already—er—picked him out! eh?”
Margaret did not seem to hear. She was looking straight through a little open space in the boughs of the apple tree to the blue sky far beyond.
“Bobby,” she began in a voice scarcely above a whisper, “if that man should be bad to my mother I think I’d—kill him.”