“Which might,” suggested the Captain, “be a prig, you know.”
But King William, listening, drank in these things. He had a garden patch in the back yard and knew the nature and habits of every vegetable in it, and being strictly a utilitarian, he weeded out sickly plants and unknown cotyledons with a ruthless hand.
Alexina expostulated. “Maybe it hurts ’em,” she feared.
“Maybe it does,” said the inexorable William; “but they are like the souls born to be damned. Put ’em on the brush pile there, and after a while we’ll burn ’em.”
At other times the yard was a sea-girt coral reef and they the stranded mariners. Generally Alexina accepted everything. The stories were new to her. But when she did have knowledge of a thing she stood firm; for instance, about the ocean, that you could not land every few moments of your progress and throw out gang-planks.
“For I’ve been there,” she insisted, “and you couldn’t, you know.”
At times they adjourned to the commons behind the stable, which, in reality, were plains frequented by Indians, or, if the yard palled or rain drove them in, there was fat, black, plausible Aunt Rose in the basement kitchen to talk to, and if Aunt Rose proved fractious and drove them out, together with her own brood generally skulking around, before a threatening dish-rag or broom, there was Charlotte to be beguiled from more serious occupation into doing her son’s bidding.
Charlotte was always busy. The cottage and all in it had come to her from her father’s aunt. She had been accustomed to seeing the windows, the furniture, the mirrors, the silver door knobs shining; therefore, she knew such things ought to shine, and since there was no one in these days but herself to do it, she cleaned, polished, rubbed, and went to bed limp.
One afternoon in the late fall, when the children sought her, she was pasting papers over glasses of jelly. “We went over the river to see the boat yesterday,” King William was saying to Alexina as they came in. “Tell her about it, mother; about the gold star at the bow.”
The papers did not want to stick. “He’s a bad boy, little Mab,” Charlotte informed her. “He made me take him over before he’d promise to go to the party he’s asked to. He wants to be a little boor who won’t know how to act when he grows up.”