Mrs. Tynan’s mouth tightened and her brow clouded. “I’ve had my problems too, but I always made quick work of them. They never had a chance to overlay me like a mother overlays her baby and kills it.”
“Not ‘like a mother overlays,’ but ‘as a mother overlays,’” returned Kitty with a queer note to her voice. “That’s what they taught me at school. The teacher was always picking us up on that kind of thing. I said a thing worse than that when Mrs. Crozier”—her fingers motioned towards another room—“came to-day. I don’t know what possessed me. I was off my trolley, I suppose, as John Sibley puts it. Well, when Mrs. James Shiel Gathorne Crozier said—oh, so sweetly and kindly—‘You are Miss Tynan?’ what do you think I replied? I said to her, ‘The same’!”
Rather an acidly satisfied smile came to Mrs. Tynan’s lips. “That was like the Slatterly girls,” she replied. “Your father would have said it was the vernacular of the rail-head. He was a great man for odd words, but he knew always just what he wanted to say and he said it out. You’ve got his gift. You always say the right thing, and I don’t know why you made that break with her—of all people.”
A meditative look came into Kitty’s eyes. “Mr. Crozier says every one has an imp that loves to tease us, and trip us up, and make us appear ridiculous before those we don’t want to have any advantage over us.”
“I don’t want Mrs. Crozier to have any advantage over you and me, I can tell you that. Things’ll never be the same here again, Kitty dear, and we’ve all got on so well; with him so considerate of every one, and a good friend always, and just one of us, and his sickness making him seem like our own, and—”
“Oh, hush—will you hush, mother!” interposed Kitty sharply. “He’s going away with her back to the old country, and we might just as well think about getting other borders, for I suppose Mr. Bulrush and his bonny bride will set up a little bulrush tabernacle on the banks of the Nile”—she nodded in the direction of the river outside—“and they’ll find a little Moses and will treat it as their very own.”
“Kitty, how can you!”
Kitty shrugged a shoulder. “It would be ridiculous for that pair to have one of their own. It’s only the young mother with a new baby that looks natural to me.”
“Don’t talk that way, Kitty,” rejoined her mother sharply. “You aren’t fit to judge of such things.”
“I will be before long,” said her daughter. “Anyway, Mrs. Crozier isn’t any better able to talk than I am,” she added irrelevantly. “She never was a mother.”