“Only what? Do tell me. I don’t want to go down stairs looking like—”
“Like your careless sister Octave! It’s only what Fritzy says about Content: the ‘lovely mind showing through her face’; so it was with you, heart’s dearest!”
And laughing at the renewed disgust in her victim’s countenance, Octave ran away. She could no more forbear teasing somebody than she could doing the hundred and one other useless things which were the result of her overflowing life. Paula was dear, really; but Paula was such fun! And poor Paula herself was just sufficiently conscious of her own shortcomings to make her doubly sensitive to others’ raillery.
Only those shortcomings did not lie in the direction she supposed; and they did lie just in the road Octave had suggested. Paula bewailed her occasional lack of dignity, her lapses from correctness of speech, her ignorance of style, and any other slight flaw in a character she was really accustomed to think a bit above par.
Full of herself, and full of plans, she had gone that afternoon to sit with her cousin Melville. The family project for improving that disagreeable invalid had been held in abeyance by the condition of poor Mrs. Capers, who, for a fortnight, had been drooping and under the doctor’s care, while her charge was almost wholly neglected by that good man.
The fright her ghastly face and fainting condition had given Mr. Pickel, after his nephew had “paid her” for her supposed resemblance to the “Witch of Endor,” had abated as the day wore on, and her injuries had appeared not to be serious. And, afterward, she had seemed not really ill, but simply not as usual.
In the secret of her own heart she believed that she had “got her warning”; and when, one day, the physician had ordered her to go to bed “for a bit,” she had felt that she was obeying him forever.
Oddly enough, yet perhaps not really so oddly after all, the old lady had taken a fancy that of all the household little Christina should attend her few wants. Paula she would not see on any pretext, and Octave she found too noisy. Content had taken her own place at Melville’s bed-side, and this was how she would have had it, since Content would bear in silence what the others would resent in anger.
Aunt Ruth was busy, always, with the needs of such a family, and gentle Amy Kinsolving’s strength would allow of her doing no more than go from room to room of the well-filled Snuggery, “carrying sunshine” and words of good-cheer.
But this day there seemed to be a lull in the rush of affairs, and Paula thought that she could do two benevolent things at once. Unfortunately, few, however skilful, do “kill two birds with one stone”; and Paula was most unskilled. Her missionary spirit was of the warlike kind; and, as she would have said to a tropical heathen, “You must read your Bible and wear these clothes,” so she started in to reform Melville by feeling that it rested with her to make him do what she considered fitting.