“But even if we did, Eleanor, even if we all married, we’d still regard you as our own, our child, our charge.”
“She said you wouldn’t.” The tears came now, and David gathered the little shaking figure to his breast. “I don’t want to be the wife of the farmer for whom fate intended me,” she sobbed. “I want to marry somebody refined with extravagant living and associations.”
“That’s one of the things we are bringing you up for, my dear.” This aspect of the case occurred to David for the first time, but he realized its potency. “You mustn’t take mother too seriously. Just jolly her along a little and you’ll soon get to be famous friends. She’s never had any little girls of her own, only my brother and me, and she doesn’t know quite how to talk to them.”
“The Hutchinsons had a hired butler and gold spoons, and they didn’t think I was the dust beneath their feet. I don’t know what to say to her. I said ain’t, and I wasn’t refined, and I’ll only just be a disgrace to you. I’d rather go back 146 to Cape Cod, and go out to work, and stand Albertina and everything.”
“If you think it’s the square thing to do,” David said slowly, “you may go, Eleanor. I’ll take you to New York to-morrow and get one of the girls to take you to Colhassett. Of course, if you do that it will put me in rather an awkward position. The others have all had you for two months and made good on the proposition. I shall have to admit that I couldn’t even keep you with me twenty-four hours. Peter and Jimmie got along all right, but I couldn’t handle you at all. As a cooperative parent, I’m such a failure that the whole experiment goes to pieces through me.”
“Not you—her.”
“Well, it’s the same thing,—you couldn’t stand the surroundings I brought you to. You couldn’t even be polite to my mother for my sake.”
“I—never thought of that, Uncle David.”
“Think of it now for a few minutes, won’t you, Eleanor?”
The rain was beginning to lash the windows, and to sweep the lawn in long slant strokes. The little girl held up her face as if it could beat through the panes on it. 147