“But I’ll give her what I can,” she thought. “I’ll give her love.”
CHAPTER VI
GROWING PAINS
That night Mary McBirney carried the candle up to the loft for Azalea and sat beside her while she undressed.
“I reckon you feel a little upset, honey,” she said in her gentle, motherly way. “You saw them grand folks with their fine ways, and beautiful home, and nice clothes, and it made you feel you wasn’t nobody. I know just how you feel. I was born up Blue River Valley way, and till I was fifteen I didn’t see nobody but folks of the same kind as mine. Then two ladies came driving through our country, writing up us mountain people, and telling all about the mountains and what trees and flowers was on ’em, and they asked me to go along to do the cooking for them, and shake down their beds for ’em and all that. So I went, and set up on the front seat of the carriage with the driver, and I heard all they had to say, and watched their way of doing things. Well, it set me back some. I found out that what I knew wouldn’t fill the thimble point of their knowing. They was wearing rough clothing for camping, but if I tried all my days I couldn’t make clothes look like that. I wouldn’t know how to buy them if I had the money. Me, I just did things anyhow, to get them done, but they had a right way for everything and rules about how to act in every kind of case. At first I tried to catch on to their ways, but at last I saw it was going to be too much for me, and I just settled down to be content in my own way with my own kind of folks. But my pillow was wet many a night, honey. Growing pains, they were. You’re having them now.”
“And so is Jim, I s’pose,” sighed the girl. “I s’pose he feels the same way—all mixed up.”
“He ain’t feeling nothing like you be,” declared ma. “Jim’s a boy, and matter of fact. He’s a leetle older than you, really, but not near so old in his feelings. Jim saw what there was to see on top—saw what was floating along the surface. But you think and feel in a different way, and your feelings go down deeper. Now mind, I don’t say that I think they always will. Jim’s tender and he’s true, and when men are tender and true they feel deeper than any woman can feel. At least no woman can get ahead of them that way. I’m waiting for Jim to get a little older before his feelings set, so to speak. Just now he ain’t got any more opinions than a nice soft bunny.”
“Oh, ma,” cried Azalea, “you don’t really know him if you think that! Jim does a lot of thinking, and he’s as tender-hearted as he can be.”
Ma McBirney blew out the candle and smiled to herself in the dark. She loved to hear her Jimmy praised. But he had seemed a little dull and backward in comparison with the girl, and in her silent jealousy for her boy, she had spoken of him in a fault-finding way. It healed her to hear him praised in that warm manner.
“We’re lucky ones, Thomas,” she said when she had gone downstairs, “to have two children like them. They’re pure gold.”
“So they be,” said pa. “So they be!”