“Yes, mother?”
“As long as she’s here you and Flora have got to quit treating her as if she were a—a fairy queen. It’s absurd. She’s got to be restrained and—and enlightened.”
“I’m quite willing to do my part. The trouble is I’ve been too busy being enlightened by her to do very much enlightening on my part.”
“Well, she hasn’t enlightened me at all. And I’ll be able to attend to her without a great deal of aid. She’s got to get down out of the clouds, to real things.”
“She doesn’t seem to fit in with our kind of realities, does she?” he conceded. And then he smiled. “If it were only right to regard even children simply as human beings! They have to be themselves sooner or later. If it were only possible to let them develop along that line from the start!”
But the kitchen door had been opened by Mrs. Shepard again—this time timorously and incompletely—and Mrs. Baron was gone.
Baron climbed two flights of stairs before he came upon the object of his next search. Bonnie May was in the attic.
She was all eagerness when she saw him. “Do you know what happened to-day?” she began.
Baron stopped abruptly. “Happened!” he echoed, unworded speculations again flooding his mind.
“Oh, nothing wrong. It’s just—Mrs. Baron gave me my first music lesson.”