“You look almost human,” Jake gave his opinion of Bull. “A touch with a powder-puff an’ I allow you might mash one o’ them criadas.”
Catching himself up short, Sliver walked to the door to expectorate. “It’s dreadfully clean in here,” he remarked, coming back. “But I reckon we’ll sorter get used to it. Now if we on’y had a bottle o’ aguardiente to hold a bit of a house-warming, it ’u’d—”
Bull looked at him with sudden sternness. “Look here! We’ve got the care of a young girl on our han’s. There’s going to be no boozing—at least on the premises. When you feel you kain’t stan’ it any longer, light out somewheres an’ get it over.”
“That’s right,” Jake lent support to the moralities. “Though it sorter looks to me like she’d adopted us.”
As a matter of fact, the girls’ talk, walking back to the house, quite favored the latter theory. While overseeing the housecleaning Lee had obtained temporary surcease from her grief. She laughed softly at Phyllis’s remark, “Aren’t they big and crude and funny?”
“Helpless and clumsy as children. But just wait till I’ve had them a month.”
“Won’t it be a little difficult? They’re grown up; can’t be treated like babies.”
“Not a bit.” Lee laughed softly again. “If one of them misbehaves, I shall quietly draw the attention of another to it. Mr. Jake will correct Mr. Bull; and Mr. Sliver, Mr. Jake. If they were girls they’d see through it at once. Being men, they’ll feel quite perked up.”
Why they should have thought it so funny is hard to say. Perhaps their merriment proceeded from that obscure source whence issues the disappointment of a woman after she has molded masculine clay in her own likeness, and wishes it back in all of its crudity again. In any case, as they looked forward to that most delightful of feminine visions, a crude man-animal, tamed and parlor broke, they laughed again.