"All the time they're doing the 'I b'lieve,' I shall go like this." She shook her head with such passionate dissent that her shock of wild hair swirled madly back and forth in a cloudy circle, completely hiding the mutinous, flushed face of the infidel.
Very soon after the formal removal of Emmie and her effects to her grandmother's bedroom, Val gave up the last lingering shred of hope that she might ever, while these misunderstood days of childhood lasted, propitiate the powers that be. She was always feeding her imagination in secret with stories of the ultimate love and adoration, not only of the suitors and heroes who should line her path later on, but of her family, too. They and the entire community should adore her one day for something wonderful and noble that she was going to be and to do in that fair future when she should be grown up and great and good.
Meanwhile there were moments when this sense of present outlawry brought with it a fierce and splendid joy. It endowed even a down-trodden child with a superhuman courage. Such a one might even go and plump herself down in the great red chair of state, and rock violently back and forth in a wild abandonment of wickedness, while Emmie stood transfixed and gran'ma's awful eyes made lightning. An outlaw so brave, she could narrate unmoved that she had taken a ride in the milkman's cart. And he had been "so perlite as to ask me how was Grandmother Gano." This horrible insult on the part of the milkman was duly punished, but Val had a momentary sense of having "got even." In the South—in any civilized community, Mrs. Gano would have told you—you did not call people "old"; it had foolishly enough come to be a term of reproach, or at least of scant respect, fit only for "any old thing" of no account. Therefore, let alone the "owdacious" familiarity of asking after a lady as "Grandmother" So-and-so, you couldn't even with decency distinguish the elder lady from her daughter-in-law by asking after old Mrs. So-and-so. In the South, where manners were still understood, you said "senior" and "junior," or, among the better class, you called the son's wife "Mrs." So-and-so, and you called the head of the family "Madam."
"Grandmother Gano, indeed! I'll grandmother him!"
It was a great score, too, when Julia Otway, Jerry's nearly two years older sister, assured Val that that common term of reproach "Grannie," was a corruption of the ancient and honorable title Gran'ma. Inseparably associating the word with the drunken rag-picker, "Ole Granny Gill," and the scathing juvenile satire, "Teach your granny to suck eggs," etc., Val determined on the next provocation to introduce the subject at home. She found occasion to dilate on the virtues of Julia Otway's grandmother. This was a shrunken and timid old lady, who sat unnoticed in the corner, clicking her knitting-needles, and usually saying nothing. When she did speak it was found her speech was odd, and the children laughed.
"Nearly everybody else's gran'ma knits stockens," Val observed one day, with critical eyes on the eternal book open on Mrs. Gano's knees.
"You know very few grandmothers," said the lady.
"I know Julia's. She's so nice. I don't wonder Julia and Jerry like her."
This elicited nothing.
"She's the kindest person. She keeps a little chest o' drawers chock-full o' doughnuts and winter-green candy."