“I don’t see what’s funny about—” Beulah began hotly.
“You don’t see what’s funny about anything,—even Rogers College, do you, darling? It is funny though for the bunch of us to undertake the upbringing of a child ten years old; to make ourselves financially and spiritually responsible for it. It’s a lot more than funny, I know, but it doesn’t seem to me as if I could go on with it at all, until somebody was willing to admit what a scream the whole thing is.”
“We’ll admit that, if that’s all you want, won’t we, Beulah?” Margaret appealed.
“If I’ve got this insatiable sense of humor, let’s 17 indulge it by all means,” Gertrude laughed. “Go on, chillun, go on, I’ll try to be good now.”
“I wish you would,” Margaret said. “Confine yourself to a syncopated chortle while I get a few facts out of Beulah. I did most of my voting on this proposition by proxy, while I was having the measles in quarantine. Beulah, did I understand you to say you got hold of your victim through Mrs. O’Farrel, your seamstress?”
“Yes, when we decided we’d do this, we thought we’d get a child about six. We couldn’t have her any younger, because there would be bottles, and expert feeding, and well, you know, all those things. We couldn’t have done it, especially the boys. We thought six would be just about the right age, but we simply couldn’t find a child that would do. We had to know about its antecedents. We looked through the orphan asylums, but there wasn’t anything pure-blooded American that we could be sure of. We were all agreed that we wanted pure American blood. I knew Mrs. O’Farrel had relatives on Cape Cod. You know what that stock is, a good sea-faring strain, and a race of wonderfully fine women, ‘atavistic aristocrats’ I remember an author in the Atlantic Monthly called them once. I suppose 18 you think it’s funny to groan, Gertrude, when anybody makes a literary allusion, but it isn’t. Well, anyway, Mrs. O’Farrel knew about this child, and sent for her. She stayed with Mrs. O’Farrel over Sunday, and now David is bringing her here. She’ll be here in a minute.”
“Why David?” Gertrude twinkled.
“Why not David?” Beulah retorted. “It will be a good experience for him, besides David is so amusing when he tries to be, I thought he could divert her on the way.”
“It isn’t such a crazy idea, after all, Gertrude.” Margaret Hutchinson was the youngest of the three, being within several months of her majority, but she looked older. Her face had that look of wisdom that comes to the young who have suffered physical pain. “We’ve got to do something. We’re all too full of energy and spirits, at least the rest of you are, and I’m getting huskier every minute, to twirl our hands and do nothing. None of us ever wants to be married,—that’s settled; but we do want to be useful. We’re a united group of the closest kind of friends, bound by the ties of—of—natural selection, and we need a purpose in life. Gertrude’s a real artist, but the rest of us are not, and—and—” 19
“What could be more natural for us than to want the living clay to work on? That’s the idea, isn’t it?” Gertrude said. “I can be serious if I want to, Beulah-land, but, honestly, girls, when I come to face out the proposition, I’m almost afraid to. What’ll I do with that child when it comes to be my turn? What’ll Jimmie do? Buy her a string of pearls, and show her the night life of New York very likely. How’ll I break it to my mother? That’s the cheerful little echo in my thoughts night and day. How did you break it to yours, Beulah?”