The remark was intended as a compliment, but Mrs. Bubble took distinct umbrage. This was, without doubt, a premeditated slur. Of course he knew that she had once been Mr. Bubble’s cook!
“Fannie can’t go,” she snapped.
Wallingford walked straight up to Mrs. Bubble, beaming down upon her from his overawing height; and for just one affrighted moment Fannie feared that he intended to uptilt her stepmother’s chin, or make some equally familiar demonstration. Instead, he only laughed down into that lady’s belligerent eyes.
“Yes, she can,” he insisted with large persuasiveness. “You were young once yourself, Mrs. Bubble, and not so very long ago.”
It was not what he said, but his jovial air of secret understanding, that made Mrs. Bubble flush and laugh nervously and soften.
“Oh, I reckon I can get along,” she said.
Miss Fannie, with a wondering glance at Wallingford, had already flown up-stairs, and J. Rufus set himself deliberately to be agreeable to Mrs. Bubble. When Fannie came tripping down again in an incredibly short space of time, having shaken herself out of one frock and into another with an expedition which surprised even herself, she found her stepmother actually giggling! And when the young couple drove away in the bright, shining new rig behind the handsome bays, Mrs. Bubble watched after them with something almost like wistfulness. She had been young herself, once—and not so very long ago!
Opposite the Bubble swamp Wallingford stopped for a moment.
“I hope to be a very near neighbor of yours,” said he, waving his hand out toward the wonderful deposit of genuine Etruscan black mud. “Did your father tell you about the pottery studios which may be built here?”
“Not a thing,” she confessed with a slightly jealous laugh. “Papa never tells us anything at home. We’ll hear it on the street, no doubt, as we usually do.”