"Now, old Di, you're mean," cried Ernest, dancing around in excitement in the narrow hall-way outside the bedroom door.
But Miss Theodora, as she bent over the package, tugging at the strings, caught sight of some sprawling letters that resolved themselves into "A birthday Present from your LOVEING nephew;" so, shaking her head at Diantha, she responded, loudly enough for Ernest to hear, and with no comment on the bad spelling, "Oh, no, it's a beautiful present from Ernest." And then Ernest ran in and undid the rest of the knots, and, setting the footstool triumphantly on its four legs on the floor, said: "Now, you'll always use it, won't you, Aunt Teddy?"
Of course Miss Theodora, as she kissed him, promised to use, and kept her promise, in spite of the fact that the little footstool—less comfortable than her well-worn carpet hassock—wasn't exactly steady on its feet. But although she so thoroughly appreciated Ernest's thoughtfulness, Miss Theodora did not regard the footstool with absolute pleasure. She was by no means sure that she approved of Ernest's skill in handicrafts. She wondered sometimes whether she ought to permit a probable lawyer to spend so much energy in work which could hardly go toward helping him in his profession. Yet, after all, she hadn't the heart to interfere with Ernest's mechanical tastes, when she saw that gratifying them gave him so much pleasure. She never forgot her fright one day on the Nahant boat, when Ernest, barely seven years old, was missing, and she found him only after a long search at the door of the engine room.
"You'd ought to be an engineer when you're grown up," she heard a gruff voice say, while Ernest meekly replied: "Well, I'd like to, but I've got to be a lawyer."
She did not scold Ernest as she took his hand to lead him up stairs, and she even lingered while he tried to put her in possession of all his own knowledge.
"This gentleman," he said apologetically, "has been explaining his engine to me," and the "gentleman," rubbing a light streak across his sooty face, turned to her with a sincere, "That there boy of yours has a big head, ma'am, for machinery, and, begging your pardon, if I was you I'd put him out to a machinist when he's a little bigger."
The plainness of Miss Theodora's dress may have placed her in this man's eye on the plane of those people who regularly sent their children to learn trades. Although in her mind she resented the suggestion, she listened attentively to Ernest as he tried, with glowing cheek and rapid tongue, to explain the various parts of the engine. If Miss Theodora never perhaps had more than a vague idea of the functions of piston and valve and the wonders of the governor, over which Ernest grew so eloquent, she was at least a sympathetic listener in this as in all other things that he cared for.