Downstairs Hannah was busily setting forth upon a round table an appetizing array of cakes and cookies with a copper pot of coffee. Mr. Eldred had arranged to be present at this unwonted function, and Hannah chattered to him as she worked.
“Be sure you shake hands with her often, Daddy dear,” she admonished him. “She is used to so very many hand-shakings a day, you know, and we mustn’t cut her down to none at all, the very first thing. It’s little matters like that that make you homesick. And homesickness is agony, Father. I know, for I’ve been through it.”
Mr. Eldred pinched the plump cheek which showed no trace of past anguish, and Hannah seated herself upon his knee, being watchful of the pleats of her skirt as she did so!
“There’s one good thing,” she philosophized. “She can’t miss her father as I should miss you, for he is so absent-minded that he really doesn’t know her from the furniture. For all she is such a mischief inside, she acts so quiet-like and well-behaved around the house that she might almost as well be a sofa and done with it. And they have plenty of sofas, so he won’t miss her and she won’t miss him so very much, either.”
125“You imply that if you were better behaved, you would not miss me so much when we are separated! It’s sufficiently complicated. I suppose you pine for my fearful reprimands?”
That was such a delightful joke that they both laughed aloud and Mrs. Eldred and Frieda were quite in the room before they realized it, and sprang up to greet them with cordiality, if not with the ceremony Hannah had planned for.
Those first days Frieda lived in a busy whirl. Hannah, once at home, and recovered from the excitement of the day in Boston, was ashamed of her conduct on that occasion, and tried to make up for it by all sorts of thoughtful attentions to Frieda, which, with the shade of formality they involved, added a little to the loneliness they were meant to combat. Mrs. Eldred, giving up, or suspending for a time, the apparently hopeless task of winning Frieda’s confidence, attended to her wardrobe with a rapidity and fervor which astonished Frieda, accustomed to long deliberations on such matters, and no reckless buying. Even the pretty frocks and hats and shoes did not please her. She felt loyalty demanded that she should wear the things she had brought from home, and it was not till Mrs. Eldred had given her her mother’s letter to read that she consented to lay aside the German garments. Mr. Eldred took her about the city, and thoroughly enjoyed her comments on 126 things American, a scorn thinly veiled by polite phrases, or by an expressive silence.
She was silent most of the time, for the language was her greatest obstacle. She remembered vividly the superior feeling she had had in Berlin, when she had watched Mr. Eldred wrestle with a conditional or had heard Mrs. Eldred struggle to pronounce “ch.” It was not nearly so pleasant to be struggling one’s self, with a quite senseless “th,” for instance. Her heart filled with rage when she caught Hannah listening intently to her carefully enunciated words, and then saying suddenly with relief, “O!” as their meaning dawned upon her. Frieda had been at the head of her class in English.
“It’s really because you pronounce so very well,” Hannah explained apologetically, on one of these occasions. “You are so much more exact than we ever think of being, that it gives an unfamiliar sound to words. And besides, yours is English English and ours is United States.”
“But English English must be best,” protested Frieda, and Hannah forgot Miss Lyndesay’s warning and “flared up” for a minute, but immediately recollected herself, and ordered an ice-cream soda as a peace-offering, notwithstanding the fact that Frieda found the taste disagreeable.