“It’s right good of you to give me a part of your holiday, Miss Pogany,” the gentleman remarked, glancing kindly upon her.
Already Meadowcroft saw that the girl’s countenance, which upon closer view resembled yet more nearly the facial type of the American Indian, was redeemed from its potential Indian impassiveness or even stolidity by her soft-brown eyes, which were gentle and lovely of expression and full of keen intelligence. Mrs. Phillips’s voice was high and thin and very penetrating, and her brother had been exceedingly annoyed to hear her greet his guest as Bouncing Bet. Now he said to himself that Black-eyed Susan would be a more fitting nickname. But he didn’t dwell upon the comparison, for it came to him that that wild flower is also called ox-eyed daisy, and that reminded him of his sister’s epithet “cow-like.”
“I was very glad to come, sir,” replied the girl politely. “I visit—the sick considerably, you know.”
“But bless you, child, I’m not sick,” he retorted, smiling. “I stay in this contraption much of the time, it is true, and one arm and leg aren’t of much service to me; but for all that——”
Pausing, he looked at her searching but very kindly. And though she was sensitive and his gaze held steadily for half a minute, Betty Pogany didn’t mind it. It seemed, indeed, rather like standing in a bar of sunlight on a chill day. For somehow, she didn’t feel that he was thinking how big she was—what a bouncing girl for under thirteen years. He seemed to be looking at the real Betty who wasn’t fat or—anything—who was just herself, a human being like others.
And as he went on, his words seemed an echo of her sensation.
“At any rate, I didn’t ask you to come in to see me as an invalid or anything of the sort, but just as a fellow human being,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I had a rather definite purpose in mind, and I don’t feel that I need to fuss and bother about leading up to it and all that, Miss Betty. I think I can get right at it at once. May I begin instanter by telling you something about a boy I knew? You’ll get the bearing.”
Betty’s eyes assented warmly though her face was as expressionless as her polite affirmation. Meadowcroft wheeled his chair about and adjusted it at a better angle. And the girl, whose part in life had been largely that of a spectator, observed the beauty of the long, slender right hand with a curious cameo on the third finger.
“The boy I speak of was lame—deformed might perhaps be a better word, though it’s rather ugly,” he began. “His parents had money—fortunately, most people would say. In any event, he was unfortunate in that they had a lot too much. They lavished it upon all sorts of specialists in surgery in the effort to have him become like other boys. Then when they found that to be quite impossible, they used the money as a barrier between him and his fellows. They padded a prison with it in which they confined him. He was shut off from the society of other boys, from the sight and so far as possible from the knowledge of boyish sports and pursuits. They kept him in ignorance, so far as was possible, of the universe as a boy knows it. I don’t think he had a genuine boy’s book until he went to boarding-school as an old man of sixteen. He had servants and tutors and drove and traveled and all that, and for years believed himself well off and a person of consequence. Then, somehow, though only when it was too late, he began to feel that something was wrong. He didn’t know what it was; but he begged to be allowed to go away to school. He felt that there he might come to know what it was that was awry. At first his parents wouldn’t hear of it; but finally they succumbed to his pleading, and a year before he was to be ready for college, he was sent to the best boarding-school they could select. He was permitted to have a man-servant, and his parents paid the expenses of another boy who served as a sort of fag. He was full of enthusiasm at first, but it didn’t last. For he didn’t fit in at all. He couldn’t get near the other lads and they couldn’t get near him, though they were well-disposed and did their level best to pretend to let him into things. He couldn’t even make an acquaintance of the boy who helped him; and he was lonelier than ever, and actually unhappy, where he had been only vaguely ill at ease before. And then presently the explanation came to him. He picked up a book belonging to the underclass boy who waited on him, and—do you understand Latin, Miss Betty?”
The girl started violently. She had been utterly lost in the narration, her dark eyes far away, her face dumbly appreciative.