“Then for goodness’ sake prove it, Dumps, and don’t wear that horridly starched, proper face. It’s enough to drive any one cracked even to look at you. You were always plain, but now that you are both plain and affected, you will be too offensive to live with before long.”
“Thank you,” I answered. “I never did come to my family for compliments, and I certainly am not getting them.”
“You won’t get them from me, or from Charley, or from Von Marlo while you behave like that. Why, I declare I’d rather be that poor, demented Augusta Moore than go on as you are doing.”
“But what am I doing?” I asked. “What do you mean? I’m doing nothing.”
“Nothing, Dumps? Be truthful with yourself. Try and get over that horrid feeling, and let us be really happy this Christmas.”
“But there was our mother—”
“She wasn’t with us last Christmas, was she?”
“She was in spirit.”
“Well, if she was with us in spirit last Christmas—when we were so jolly miserable, and I had that bad influenza, and Charley sprained his foot, and we had hardly any Christmas dinner and no Christmas-boxes at all except the things we managed to make with the old carpenter’s tools, and when father forgot to come home till the evening, and you began to cry and said that he had been run over by an omnibus—if mother was with us in spirit when we were all really wretched, don’t you think she will be twenty times more in spirit with us now when we are all jolly and good and good-humoured? If our mother is an angel in heaven—and I suppose you believe she is—she must be blessing that sweet woman Grace Donnithorne, as you used to call her, every moment of the time. Oh, there! I needn’t say any more. I’ll let Von Marlo have a talk with you.”
“But he sha’n’t—I won’t be talked to,” I said.