She watched them as they went out, the rusty widow with her profoundly cynical red face, the fragile, shabby child clinging to her, stealing sidelong glances at the “young ladies,” who were getting ready to go home. She was determined to save that lovely and abused child.
She had hurried home to “consult” her brother. Not that she had any real regard for his opinion or any desire to know what it was; she knew, in fact, that he probably would advise her to use her own judgment. But she considered it decent to consult the man in the house; so she approached him with her idea.
“A lovely little thing,” she said. “Really beautiful—and so intelligent looking.”
“Yes?” said Mr. Humbert.
“And something really refined about her.... Really, Morton, I should like to adopt her.”
That roused him. A child in the place! Impossible! He tried to argue, but he couldn’t. He was never able to. He had some queer constitutional inability for argument; a fatal lassitude would overwhelm him before he had begun even to express his views. He always ran away, shut himself into his own room and forced himself to forget whatever it was that he had found unpleasant.
“I’d have to see the woman, of course,—investigate...” he said, hoping in this way to push the whole topic away into the distance.
But his sister agreed with alarming promptness.
“Of course!” she said.
Well, then, two days later, when he came home from his office, and as usual put his head in at the kitchen door to announce himself and to see what was going forward, he saw sitting in two chairs side by side a voluminous widow and a thin little girl, drinking cocoa with relish and with elegance, little fingers crooked in the air.