Mother died in agonee.
Father looked quite sad and vexed—
"Sarah, my child," he said, "what next?"
Any one to whom this seems a futile and non-humorous piece of verse needs only to hear Lucilla's delivery of it, and catch the almost imperceptible shade of displeasure and surprise that touched her slender eyebrows at the last line, to realize that all similar exhibitions must seem forever crude beside it.
They begged Marjory to sing and got her a guitar. As it had slowly dawned on her that most of the girls in the room played something, and that at least one third of them belonged to one or another of the musical clubs besides the many other organizations they carried, and thought nothing whatever of it—or concealed it if they did—her estimate of a hitherto much prized accomplishment had steadily decreased. She sang a little serenade for them, however, more tremulously than she had been wont to sing for a crowd of young people, and took an unreasoning and disproportionate amount of pleasure in their hearty applause. She sang again, and when Miss Cornelia Burt, who turned out to be the dark girl she had watched at Kingsley's and recognized, thanked her particularly and told her with a smile that she should "come up" and sing that with the Glee Club, Marjory remembered that she was a prominent senior, and found her heart beating a little faster when her friend Miss Twitchell, also prominent, repeated the suggestion. It could not be, she asked herself a moment afterwards, that she was proud to have them notice her?
There were more stunts, for the Amiable Parent could not have enough of what Nan called Dodo's Anglo-Saxon attitudes. Only the bell brought a stop to the proceedings, which had grown more and more hilarious, ending with a toast in ginger ale, to the delighted hero of the feast:
Oh, here's to Nannie's Dad, drink him down!
Oh, here's to Nannie's Dad, drink him down!
Oh, here's to Nannie's Dad,