"This is not the Bible, it is Lockhart's Scott," she answered. "And as for the four-leaved clovers, I find them as I walk about in the evenings."
"I suppose you look for them because they're so lucky?"
"Nonsense! of course not. They just look up at me from the grass."
Ethan felt dashed a little, but he noticed how the long, slim fingers held the book so that no more clovers should fall out. She must think a good deal of them, he concluded.
Many an older person under the circumstances would have felt it incumbent upon her to entertain the child; but while no doubt some young people might have been made happier by being noticed more, there are those, especially the shy and sensitive ones, who are all the better for a little wholesome letting alone. It is evident that the officious attempts of many well-meaning adults to amuse, even if it involve making mountebanks of themselves, are ofttimes destined to humiliation. We have all seen children solemnly regarding grown-up capers with the air of philosophers looking down with scorn upon an antic world.
There was something in his grandmother's calm pursuit of her usual routine that set the child at ease. If she had gone obviously out of her way to make herself agreeable to him, he, with the perversity of his type, would have been more on his guard against her blandishments.
His Boston relatives were evidently quite wrong in every respect about his grandmother. His grandfather Tallmadge had sympathized with him deeply at having to pay this duty visit. Even Aunt Hannah had evident misgivings, and had put a seed-cake in his trunk. He felt a sudden resentment against those estimable persons for their distrust and thinly veiled dislike of his grandmother Gano. Already he saw himself her champion and faithful knight, ready to do battle, if need be, for his sovereign lady. It was not altogether strange that the conquest of the child was so speedy, for the heart of the woman was full of a passionate tenderness for this little Ethan come back again, so like the one she had lost that he seemed to bring with him her youth and all the sunny circumstance of those far-off Maryland days. She softened wondrously to the child, yet it was so little her way to be demonstrative that she neither alarmed nor bored the boy, but simply took hold on his imagination. He, quick of spirit and keen of sense, responded as the natural child will, to the reassuring spectacle of beautiful and august age. What children suffer from sheer ugliness in their elders is not to be written down. Partly in that many mercifully forget, and partly in that others remember certain martyrdoms too vividly to set them down without a blush. One is inclined to think, looking back, that life has taught us nothing more successfully than tolerance of these departures from a possible comeliness; for it is not irregularity of feature or deepening furrows or whitening hair that appall the child, but the unnecessary ugliness of dress and eccentricity of demeanor, and, above all, the avoidable and indecent display of the ravages of time.
With every desire to think nobly of women, it must be admitted that it is chiefly they who offend against the canon childhood unconsciously sets up, that old age shall not with impunity offend or affright the young.
Mrs. Gano would have repelled indignantly the idea that her grandson's affection had anything to do with her spotless neatness; the sober distinction of her plain silk gowns, made before the war; her white lawn kerchiefs, rolling up from her V-shaped bodice, fold on fold, voluminous and soft about her neck; her full lawn undersleeves, that came so daintily out from the silk, and fastened with a silver shell button at the wrist, flowing out again in a fine ruffle, and falling over her hands. As to that most distinctive touch of all, the veil of plain white net that covered, and yet did not conceal, the thick silver hair massed about the high shell comb, one cannot help thinking that if she had quite realized its effectiveness, she would have considered it her duty to discard it. She always said she disliked caps as "would-be ornamental," and besides, she had "too much hair;" she "would be top-heavy in a cap." So she had adopted the white net veil, fastened just behind the heavy rings of hair on the temples with a pair of pearl and silver pins of curious old design, and the veil fell down to the shoulders behind, concealing the neck, masking a little the droop of the bowed back, and falling softly down each side of the strong old face, and dropping into her lap.
The child sat with the open book in his hand, but with big eyes roving, reading as well as he could the more obscure but not less interesting story incarnate in the great red chair, getting the details by heart in the observant way of children.