“Yet she is only amusing herself. See how stolid that creature looks that she is wasting all her vitality on.”
“She has told him some joke and she is laughing at it. He has put his monocle in his other eye in his effort to see the point. He will get it by the next boat. Wish she’d come and tell that joke to me. I’d laugh at it.”
My sister eyed me critically.
“You don’t look as if you could laugh,” she said.
“I wonder what would happen if I should fall dead and drop over into the lap of that fat elephant in pink silk with the red neck,” I said, musingly.
“She wouldn’t even wink,” said my sister, laughingly. “But if you struck her just right you would bounce clear up here again and I could catch you.”
“It is just four o’clock in Chicago,” I said.
My sister promptly turned her back on me.
“And Billy has just wakened from his nap, and Katy is giving him his food,” I went on. (Billy is my sister’s baby.) “And then mamma will come into the nursery presently and take him while Katy gets his carriage out, and she will show him my picture and ask him who it is (because she wrote me she always did it at this time), and then he will say, ‘Tattah,’ which is the sweetest baby word for ‘Auntie’ I ever heard from mortal lips, and then he will kiss it of his own accord. Mamma wrote that he had blistered it with his kisses, and it’s one of the big ones, but I don’t care; I’ll order a dozen more if he will blister them all. And then she will say, ‘Where did mamma and Tattah go?’ and he will wave his precious little square hand and say, ‘Big boat,’ and she says he tries to say, ‘Way off’—and, oh, dear, we are ‘way off’—”
“Stop talking, you fiend,” said my sister, from the depths of her handkerchief. “You know I look like a fright when I cry.”