"So-o?" acquiesced the girl softly. If her spirit faltered for an instant, her blue eyes fortunately faltered no lower than the great clutter of boxes that flanked Mrs. Gallien's bed in every direction. "For why are there so many boxes?" she looked up suddenly to ask with a smile that would have disarmed a Tartar.
"Why—why those are just some things I've been buying lately," relaxed Mrs. Tome Gallien ever so slightly. "There isn't so very much to do here, some days, except just to read the advertisements in the back of the magazines—and send for things. Martha hates it!" she added with a sudden wry glance at Martha's impassive face.
"O-h!" said Solvei. And the word was divided absolutely evenly between praise of the boxes and disparagement of Martha.
The boxes seemed to have heard their part of it anyway. The string on a huge brown paper package burst suddenly as though for sheer excitement.
"Martha will show you to your room," said Mrs. Tome Gallien quite imperviously. "And whatever else you try to jar, pray don't waste 131 your energies trying to jar Martha. By a most merciful dispensation of Providence her sensibilities have been wrapped in a cotton batting silence for the past twenty years. You may in time learn to understand me," she smiled faintly with her first kindness. "But you will never understand Martha. Come back to me after supper, if you wish. And wear something blue if you have it. I like you in blue."
It was long after supper when Solvei returned. But at least she was in blue, and a very neat and trim blue it was and essentially boyish with its soft collar rolling back sailor- wise from her slender throat. Like one fairly consumed with the winter novelty of boats and beaches, too full of a hundred new excitements to speak, she dropped down on the low footstool by Mrs. Tome Gallien's pungent, smoky, lightwood fire, and with her blue elbows on her blue knees and her white chin cupped in her white hands, sat staring wide-eyed at her hostess. The whole breathless significance of youth was in her face. Youth struggled eternally for its own best 132self-expression. But when she spoke, a single sentence only burst from her lips.
"What was in that big brown bundle-box that should burst so?" she asked with a sudden elfish impudence.
But instead of being annoyed by the question, Mrs. Tome Gallien seemed on the contrary to be rather amused with it.
"You like boxes?" she asked with a faintly quizzical lift of her eyebrows.
"Boxes?" flamed Solvei. "It is like the new day! When the string breaks—it is the dawn! 'What should there then be in it?' jumps the heart. What is there yet that will come?"