"Maybe she hates herself at three on the rose-bank, too," surmised Maud. "Tell Adele and it'll cheer her. Algy's so hot over the treatment of Juliette at home, he goes around every single day to see her."
"And we didn't half take up his row that time when he wouldn't go to college. I'd almost forgotten till Juliette reminded me. Have you ever thought what a real dear Algy's always been? We haven't half estimated him? When persons do and do for you, you come to take it for granted? Think how we've always called on Algy?"
"I suppose," said Maud to this reflectively, as she stood at the washstand rinsing her hands of their paint stains, "we're all fools to some other intelligence. Algy's seemed slower than the rest of us. And now I want to read you a note from Mr. Welling showing where he puts me. As I just said, meaning myself as well as Algy, we're all fools to some other intelligence. Of course, Mr. Welling is older and has had college and has been about, but still it's trying. And I've been so altogether complacent, imagining he was getting value received in his visits round here, reading German with me, and all. Maybe he has been getting it in a sense I hadn't reckoned on," bitterly. "He asked me the other night, Selina, in that jocular way of his that one ought always to distrust, if I had read the editorial in the morning paper on our new democratic president's first message. I hadn't. I didn't know there was a message, and I knew I wasn't a bit bright as to just what a president's message is supposed to be. I had to formulate some sort of position though, and so as I went along, I said no, I never read the papers much, that Mamma glanced over the deaths and headlines and reported them while Papa ate his breakfast, and then Papa went off with the paper in his pocket. And I added that we were on the other side anyhow, that the Addisons had been Unionists, and were with the republican interests ever since."
"I know," said Selina hastily, this being the one thing about Maud and her family always hard to get around, and therefore a matter to refrain from dwelling on as far as possible.
"'Mr. Welling looked at me in that ... quizzing way of his.'"
Maud was continuing: "Mr. Welling looked at me in that prolonged, considering, quizzing way of his, his spectacles somehow always seeming to intensify the effect, you know what I mean, and with his lips pursed as if he were having a jolly good time for some unseen reason. He generally is when he looks that way, and at somebody else's expense, too. I hurried to add that of course I supposed I ought to show more interest in questions of the day and that perhaps I would if the papers were ever at hand around the house."
"I never read them much myself," agreed Selina, "except when something comes up that I hear Papa and Culpepper talking to each other about. Then I try to remember to look it up."