“I could let down the hem of these dresses, Aunt Beulah,” she said one day, looking down at the long stretch of leg protruding from the chic blue frock that made her look like a Boutet de 56 Monvil. “I can’t hem very good, but my stitches don’t show much.”
“That dress isn’t too short, dear. It’s the way little girls always wear them. Do little girls on Cape Cod wear them longer?”
“Yes, Aunt Beulah.”
“How long do they wear them?”
“Albertina,” they had reached the point of discussion of Albertina now, and Beulah was proud of it, “wore her dresses to her ankles, be—because her—her legs was so fat. She said that mine was—were getting to be fat too, and it wasn’t refined to wear short dresses, when your legs were fat.”
“There are a good many conflicting ideas of refinement in the world, Eleanor,” Beulah said.
“I’ve noticed there are, since I came to New York,” Eleanor answered unexpectedly.
Beulah’s academic spirit recognized and rejoiced in the fact that with all her docility, Eleanor held firmly to her preconceived notions. She continued to wear her dresses short, but when she was not actually on exhibition, she hid her long legs behind every available bit of furniture or drapery.
The one doubt left in her mind, of the child’s initiative and executive ability, was destined to be 57 dissipated by the rather heroic measures sometimes resorted to by a superior agency taking an ironic hand in the game of which we have been too inhumanly sure.
On the fifth week of Eleanor’s stay Beulah became a real aunt, the cook left, and her own aunt and official chaperon, little Miss Prentis, was laid low with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism. Beulah’s excitement on these various counts, combined with indiscretions in the matter of overshoes and overfatigue, made her an easy victim to a wandering grip germ. She opened her eyes one morning only to shut them with a groan of pain. There was an ache in her head and a thickening in her chest, the significance of which she knew only too well. She found herself unable to rise. She lifted a hoarse voice and called for Mary, the maid, who did not sleep in the house but was due every morning at seven. But the gentle knock on the door was followed by the entrance of Eleanor, not Mary.