“My aunt Gertrude is the funniest. I never laugh at what she says, but I have trouble not to. By thinking of Grandpa’s rheumaticks I stop myself just in time. Aunt Beulah means all right, and wants to do right and have everybody else the same.
“Uncle David is not handsome, but good.
“Uncle Jimmie is not handsome, but his hair curls.
“Uncle Peter is the most handsome man that ere the sun shown on. That is poetry. He has beautiful teeth, and I like him.
“Yesterday the Wordsworth Club—that’s what Uncle Jimmie calls us because he says we are seven—went to the Art Museum to edjucate me in art.
“Aunt Beulah wanted to take me to one room and keep me there until I asked to come out. 54 Uncle Jimmie wanted to show me the statures. Uncle David said I ought to begin with the Ming period and work down to Art Newvoo. Aunts Gertrude and Margaret wanted to take me to the room of the great masters. While they were talking Uncle Peter and I went to see a picture that made me cry. I asked him who she was. He said that wasn’t the important thing, that the important thing was that one man had nailed his dream. He didn’t doubt that lots of other painters had, but this one meant the most to him. When I cried he said, ‘You’re all right, Baby. You know.’ Then he reached down and kissed me.”
As the month progressed, it seemed to Beulah that she was making distinct progress with the child. Since the evening when Peter had won Eleanor’s confidence and explained her mental processes, her task had been illumined for her. She belonged to that class of women in whom maternity arouses late. She had not the facile sympathy which accepts a relationship without the endorsement of the understanding, and she was too young to have much toleration for that which was not perfectly clear to her. 55
She had started in with high courage to demonstrate the value of a sociological experiment. She hoped later, though these hopes she had so far kept to herself, to write, or at least to collaborate with some worthy educator, on a book which would serve as an exact guide to other philanthropically inclined groups who might wish to follow the example of cooperative adoption; but the first day of actual contact with her problem had chilled her. She had put nothing down in her note-book. She had made no scientific progress. There seemed to be no intellectual response in the child.
Peter had set all these things right for her. He had shown her the child’s uncompromising integrity of spirit. The keynote of Beulah’s nature was, as Jimmie said, that she “had to be shown.” Peter pointed out the fact to her that Eleanor’s slogan also was, “No compromise.” As Eleanor became more familiar with her surroundings this spirit became more and more evident.