Biscuits assented warmly. "And you understand, Suttie," she continued, "that it's not everybody I'd speak to in this way or that Martha would have. Martha's rather particular: she understands that Alberta May is a little trying, good and kind as she is. But I realize what a good thing it would be for Martha to be with somebody who wouldn't be so shocked whenever she said anything to that skull."
"Oh, that skull!" said Sutton M., with a wave of her brown hand. She looked up and caught Biscuits' eye with the sharp, uncompromisingly literal Sutton twinkle. "Biscuits," she demanded, "did anybody ever know of anything really bad that Martha ever did—ever?"
"Never," said Biscuits, promptly.
Sutton M. chuckled: "That's what we always thought," she said, and added: "Well, I'll try it, and," very solemnly, "you can trust me, Biscuits—I promise you."
When Biscuits went back to Martha's room she missed the skull, and beheld on the newly dusted bookshelves a decorous row of historical works and an assortment of German classics. This gratified her, for it was with the German department that Martha's erratic methods of study most obviously clashed. Martha was detaching from the wall a pleasing engraving representing a long white lady with her head hanging off from a couch, on which she somewhat obtrusively reclined, an unwholesome demon perching upon her chest and a ghastly white horse peeping at her between gloomy curtains. This cheerful effect was entitled "The Nightmare," and as it left the wall, Martha fell upon an enlargement in colored chalk of one of Mr. Beardsley's most vivid conceptions, and laid them away together.
"Why, Martha!" she exclaimed, "this is really too much—there's no reason why you should take your things down!"
Martha smiled tolerantly. "Oh, it makes no matter to me," she said indifferently. "I know the Loti by heart, anyhow, and though none of these things affect me in the slightest way—I really can't see anything in them one way or the other—still I frankly refuse to take any responsibility. If the child should happen to feel that the skull, for instance—"
Biscuits grinned. "It's one less thing to dust, anyway," she remarked, and left Martha to her work of reconstruction.
She wandered in, one evening, two or three weeks later, to get a German dictionary, and beheld with a pardonable pride the Twins gabbling their irregular verbs in whispers by the lamp, while Martha, stretched on the couch beneath the gas, communed with Schiller and the dictionary. The Twins gave her one swift ineffable glance, kicked each other under the table, and bent their eyes upon their grammars: Martha nodded to her, indicated the Twins with one of her three-volume smiles, and drawled as she handed her the dictionary, "In the words of Mr. Dooley and the Cubans, 'Pa-pa has lost his job, and all is now happiness and a cottage-organ'!"
THE FIFTH STORY