The timid question brought a quick change in the mother's face, a kindling of a fire within the mother breast. She straightened her slender body.
"And if there's anything too good for my girlie I'd like to see it! Isn't this the land where all men are equal and my girl and boy shall have a school as good as the best and grow up to be maybe the President himself?" She repeated the words softly as though they made a creed, learned carefully and with supreme faith. Why had she come, indeed, to this crowded, noisy city from her fair home meadows if not for this promise it held out to her?
"And isn't your brother the head of his class?" she finished triumphantly. "And it's smarter than ever you'll be yourself with your little books. Oh, childy!" She caught the little girl, doll and all, into an impulsive embrace.
From it Beryl wriggled to a practical curiosity as to supper. She sniffed. Her mother nodded.
"Stew! And with dumplin's—" She made it sound like fairy food. "Ready to the beating when your father comes."
"Where's Dale? And Pop?"
"It's Dale's night at the store. And Pop'll be comin' along any minute. I've set the lamp for him."
"I'm hungry," Beryl complained. She sat down cross-legged on the spotless scrap of carpeting and proceeded with infinite tenderness to disrobe the doll.
"Do you think she will like it here?" she asked suddenly, looking about the humble room which for the Lynch's, served as parlor, dining-room and kitchen. Now its bareness lay wrapped in a kindly shadow through which glinted diamond sparks from much-scrubbed tin. "It's nice—" Beryl meditated. She loved this hour, she loved the singing tea-kettle and the smell of strong soap and her mother's face in the lamplight, with all the loud noises of the street hushed, and the ugliness outside hidden by the closed door, against the paintless boards of which had been nailed a flaming poster inviting the nation's youth to join the Navy.