“So do I—in theory—” Gertrude answered, a little dreamily. “Where do Jimmie and Eleanor get the rest of their meals?”
“I can’t seem to find out,” Beulah said. “I asked Eleanor point-blank this morning what they had to eat last night and where they had it, and she said, ‘That’s a secret, Aunt Beulah.’ When I asked her why it was a secret and who it was a secret with, she only looked worried, and said she guessed she wouldn’t talk about it at all because that was the only way to be safe about tattling. You know what I think—I think Jimmie is taking her around to the cafés and all the shady extravagant restaurants. He thinks it’s sport and it keeps him from getting bored with the child.”
“Well, that’s one way of educating the young,” Gertrude said, “but I think you are wrong, Beulah.”
CHAPTER VII
One Descent into Bohemia
“Aunt Beulah does not think that Uncle Jimmie is bringing me up right,” Eleanor confided to the pages of her diary. “She comes down here and is very uncomforterble. Well he is bringing me up good, in some ways better than she did. When he swears he always puts out his hand for me to slap him. He had enough to swear of. He can’t get any work or earn wages. The advertisement business is on the bum this year becase times are so hard up. The advertisers have to save their money and advertising agents are failing right and left. So poor Uncle Jimmie can’t get a place to work at.
“The people in the other studios are very neighborly. Uncle Jimmie leaves a sine on the door when he goes out. It says ‘Don’t Knock.’ They don’t they come right in and borrow things. Uncle Jimmie says not to have much to do with them, becase they are so queer, but when I am not at home, the ladies come to call on him, and drink 73 Moxie or something. I know becase once I caught them. Uncle Jimmie says I shall not have Behemiar thrust upon me by him, and to keep away from these ladies until I grow up and then see if I like them. Aunt Beulah thinks that Uncle Jimmie takes me around to other studios and I won’t tell but he does not take me anywhere except to walk and have ice-cream soda, but I say I don’t want it because of saving the ten cents. We cook on an old gas stove that smells. I can’t do very good housekeeping becase things are not convenient. I haven’t any oven to do a Saturday baking in, and Uncle Jimmie won’t let me do the washing. I should feel more as if I earned my keap if I baked beans and made boiled dinners and layer cake, but in New York they don’t eat much but hearty food and saluds. It isn’t stylish to have cake and pie and pudding all at one meal. Poor Grandpa would starve. He eats pie for his breakfast, but if I told anybody they would laugh. If I wrote Albertina what folks eat in New York she would laugh.
“Uncle Jimmie is teaching me to like salud. He laughs when I cut up lettice and put sugar on it. He teaches me to like olives and dried up 74 sausages and sour crought. He says it is important to be edjucated in eating, and everytime we go to the Delicate Essenn store to buy something that will edjucate me better. He teaches me to say ‘I beg your pardon,’ and ‘Polly vous Fransay?’ and to courtesy and how to enter a room the way you do in private theatricals. He says it isn’t knowing these things so much as knowing when you do them that counts, and then Aunt Beulah complains that I am not being brought up.