The boys did not bother to respond even with a laugh. They were used to Kate’s nonsense.
But now in their climb up the steep elm-shaded street they had reached the college campus on the “Heights” and Professor Hart’s house set into its corner.
“I’ll take my books,” Kate said. “Thanks for carrying ’em. If I do a lot of weeding in the court, perhaps it’ll pay you a little for having been such good pack-horses for me all this year.”
But Sam shook his head at the outstretched hands. “I’m coming on with you,” he declared. “How about you, Lee?”
“Me, too,” Lee responded. “Wait a second till I pitch these things on to the piazza.”
But Kate protested. “No, don’t. It’s almost supper time. The bus was late. We’ll be busy, Mother and I. Come after supper, instead, and help us decide where the new garden is to be. Perhaps mother will play Mah Jong with us.”
There was nothing to do but agree when Kate took a dictatorial tone. The boys meekly gave a pile of books into her arms and turned in at their own walk.
Kate’s mouth kept its uptilted corners as she went on alone, humming to herself and thinking pleasant thoughts. She skirted the forsaken campus a little way and then took a short-cut across its lawns. She knew that the last student had left to-day, and there would be no “grass police” to shoo her back to the paths.
“It’s great having all the girls gone,” she mused. “Now I shall have a little of Mother to myself again.”
Kate was justified in her pleasure in the girls’ departure, for those older girls did take an unconscionable amount of Katherine Marshall’s time and thought. Of course, Katherine had to teach them, Kate realized—that was how she earned their living. But she did not understand why, outside of classroom hours, they need be always underfoot. Kate was proud of her mother’s popularity, but often exasperated by it, too; for those older girls never by any chance paid any attention to Kate herself. They were polite, of course, but most perfunctorily; it was her mother they came to see and on her least word and motion they hung almost with bated breath. The truth was that these indifferent, superior girls, always present and never of any use to her, turned the college year for Katherine into a loneliness that even her mother scarcely realized.