To her surprise, he did not make himself half so disagreeable as she had expected. It may be that he, too, felt drawn to the high-spirited girl whose whole life was such a contrast to his own; or it may be that his heart was softened by the reports from the apartment of his grandmother, whom he had really loved in his own selfish fashion, even though he had tormented her in so unmanly a manner. Then, too, there was sound common-sense at the bottom of his nature, and he could but see that it was an impossibility for even energetic Aunt Ruth to look after three invalids in as many separate places.
“With Grandmother Amy thrown in for good measure,” concluded Octave, quietly.
Twenty-four hours proved the experiment a success, and another twenty-four made Melville wonder how he had ever managed without this new companion, though she did scarcely one thing he desired her to do.
“You’ve been coddled and babied till you aren’t half a boy, Melville Capers; and a good thing it is for you that your grandmother is sick and I have come to take her place. Not a bit of coddling you’ll get from me, so you needn’t look for it!”
If he fretted, she laughed. If he read sentimental or melancholy poems, as he was given to doing, she repeated Mother Goose. If he praised Dickens, she lauded Scott. If he complained of his cruel portion in life, she ridiculed him and told him it was his own fault.
“What do you mean?” he demanded, after this last seemingly heartless assertion.
“Why, I heard Aunt Ruth say that, if you had not been so afraid of trying heroic treatment when you were little, you might have been cured. Even when you first came here, and that is only three years ago. But you cried, and ‘couldn’t,’ and your poor grandmother loved you so she ‘wouldn’t,’ and so you have no one to blame for a wasted life but your own cowardly self.”
“Octave Pickel! You are rightly named.”
“I think so. My family is an honorable one.”
“But you are Pickel by name and the sourest kind of a pickle by nature.”