Strange to relate, Dolly had not kept close to Phyl in this.
“No, I didn’t, mama,” she said in surprise; “don’t you remember I was helping you put the silver in tissue-paper?” Then her head dropped a little. [46] ]“But in the afternoon I called her a demon,” she said.
Mrs. Conway was much startled, though she knew of the strange little bursts of anger that sometimes possessed her second small daughter.
“Oh, Dolly,” she said in a grieving voice, “that a word like that should come from the lips of one of my little girls!”
Dorothy in her turn was horrified.
“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t weally say it with my tongue, mama—Ha’yat didn’t hear at all; I said it down in my thwoat.”
“That is nearly as bad,” said the mother, and called upon the young person to account for such a word rising even to her throat.
Dorothy spoke of the circumstances that caused the heinous offence in low tones. It seemed Jennie and Suey were dangerously ill in bed with consumption and “appleplexy,” and of course they ought to have been kept very warm, and the counterpane being thin, they had covered the bed over with one of their sealskin jackets. And just as the “crisis” came, Harriet had dragged the jacket away to hang it up, and all the clothes were pulled off Jennie, too.
“She hadn’t a thing left on but her night-gown, and her flannel jacket,” said the child.
“She had a frightful relapse,” said Phyl darkly, “and it turned to heart disease.”