Meadowcroft’s brow clouded. It seemed more than a pity.
Tommy leaned towards him. His voice fell very low.
“She cried all that night—or most all, and when her father saw her eyes all swelled up in the morning he was fierce’n ever. And she must ’a looked queer, because it was bad enough when I saw her after dinner. She had agreed to come over to see my new trick of making a banana peel itself in a bottle and she came right along where another girl would have been mortified to show she’d been crying and would have broken her word. Don’t tell I told you.”
“No, indeed, Tommy,” the other assured him. For some moments he gazed frowningly into the distance. Then he turned to the boy.
“By the way, Tommy, what sort of a man is Mr. Pogany?” he inquired. “I never spoke to him.”
“Some say he’s as hard as the ten-penny nails he sells, but I don’t myself go that far with ’em,” Tommy remarked in his judicial manner. “I like him pretty well. He’s about as good as the average and a lot easier to get along with than my dad. And in many ways he’s good to Betty, and when he ain’t, it’s more than likely because her Aunt Sarah sics him on to be fierce. Now Bet wanted one of those swell sailor-suits to wear to high school—Peter Thompkinses, they call ’em—and she coaxed him, and he up and got her one. Don’t tell, but she had to get a twenty-year-old size. She looks mighty decent in it just the same.”
“I don’t doubt it. But, Tommy, has she tried coaxing him up, as you put it, in regard to walking to school?”
“She don’t dass. She knows him pretty well, you see. And when he once gets his mad up, it’s no cinch, believe me. And more often than not, he does just as Aunt Sarah says about Betty, and she’s such a spiteful old cat. Just think, she hasn’t forgiven Betty yet because she left off—” he moved nearer and whispered the word “corsets” in Meadowcroft’s ear.
As for Humphrey Meadowcroft, he felt himself strangely disturbed. It appeared that he had set his heart upon the project as warmly as had the girl hers, so that his sensation, also, might be expressed by Tommy’s “more like a broken heart.” Furthermore, he had expected much in the way of results that Betty would not have thought of. As he had told her, the walking would undoubtedly have limbered her up mentally as well as physically and made her more pliant and supple in every way. But he had secretly believed it would do more. He had felt that the regular exercise would gradually reduce her weight so that within a year she would become merely a large, well-grown girl instead of a baby giant.
Long after Tommy had gone, Meadowcroft sat pondering upon the difficulty. He felt that the plan should not be given over without a struggle, and yet he didn’t know what he could do. It had been different in the case of Rose Harrow’s mother. There was no question in regard to the advisability of the blind girl’s going to school and getting an education; and his own handicap had given him a pretext for speaking to Mrs. Harrow about it. But this was another matter. If a father believed his daughter ought not to walk five miles a day, what right had he to go to him to ask him to reverse his decision? Mr. Pogany wouldn’t presume to come here to advise him. How should he, then, take it upon himself to criticize his care of his daughter?