Late in the afternoon Beulah suggested a nap. “I’ll sit here and read for a few minutes,” she said, as she tucked Eleanor under the covers. Then, since she was quite desperate for subjects of conversation, and still determined by the hot memory of her night’s vigil to leave no stone of geniality unturned, she added:
“This is a book that I am reading to help me to know how to guide and educate you. I haven’t had much experience in adopting children, you know, Eleanor, and when there is anything in this world that you don’t know, there is usually some good and useful book that will help you to find out all about it.”
Even to herself her words sounded hatefully patronizing and pedagogic, but she was past the point of believing that she could handle the situation 38 with grace. When Eleanor’s breath seemed to be coming regularly, she put down her book with some thankfulness and escaped to the tea table, where she poured tea for her aunt, and explained the child’s idiosyncrasies swiftly and smoothly to that estimable lady.
Left alone, Eleanor lay still for a while, staring at the design of pink roses on the blue wall-paper. On Cape Cod, pink and blue were not considered to be colors that could be combined. There was nothing at all in New York like anything she knew or remembered. She sighed. Then she made her way to the window and picked up the book Beulah had been reading. It was about her, Aunt Beulah had said,—directions for educating her and training her. The paragraph that caught her eye where the book was open had been marked with a pencil.
“This girl had such a fat, frog like expression of face,” Eleanor read, “that her neighbors thought her an idiot. She was found to be the victim of a severe case of ad-e-noids.” As she spelled out the word, she recognized it as the one Beulah had used earlier in the day. She remembered the sudden sharp look with which the question had been accompanied. The sick lady for whom she had 39 “worked out” had often called her an idiot when her feet had stumbled, or she had failed to understand at once what was required of her.
Eleanor read on. She encountered a text replete with hideous examples of backward and deficient children, victims of adenoids who had been restored to a state of normality by the removal of the affliction. She had no idea what an adenoid was. She had a hazy notion that it was a kind of superfluous bone in the region of the breast, but her anguish was rooted in the fact that this, this was the good and useful book that her Aunt Beulah had found it necessary to resort to for guidance, in the case of her own—Eleanor’s—education.
When Beulah, refreshed by a cup of tea and further sustained by the fact that Margaret and Peter had both telephoned they were coming to dinner, returned to her charge, she found the stolid, apathetic child she had left, sprawling face downward on the floor, in a passion of convulsive weeping.