“And did you behave ‘beautifully,’ too?”
She had drawn her chair close to the window and was looking out, so that he saw, chiefly, a small shoulder and a profile which was quite eloquent of independence and courage. “Yes, I think I did. Of course, it was harder for me than for her. You see, I had to be It, as the saying is. Yes, that’s how to express it. She had framed the game up, and I had to be It.”
“What—what really happened?”
“She began in that innocent way of hers. She thought a little knowledge of music would be good for me. I said yes to that. Yes, she went on, it would be quite proper for me to learn to play some of the simpler hymns. When she said ‘hymns’——”
She sat quite askew and laughed, and when Baron made no response at all she became uneasy. “You know you’ve got to protect yourself,” she insisted defiantly.
“Very well; and then what?”
“I told her it was so good of her to be willing to teach me, but that—well, I told her hymns wouldn’t do.”
“Why wouldn’t they do? They’re music.”
“It’s like I told her. Hymns are all well enough for persons who don’t understand very well—like raised letters for the blind. But when Mrs. Shepard lets me set the table, how would it sound if I kept saying: ‘I’m helping Mrs. Shepard! I’m helping Mrs. Shepard!’ She might be too polite to say anything, but she’d be thinking: ‘The gabby little thing, why don’t she just do it and let it go at that?’ On the other hand, if I just did the best I could without making out that I was the whole show, she’d be apt to say: ‘Bless her heart, she’s really helping.’ I think singing hymns is about the same thing. It’s as if you kept saying: ‘I’m praising God! I’m praising God!’ It would be—oh, bad taste. But if you sang ‘Annie Laurie,’ or something like that, you can imagine they’d bend their ears up in the skies—if they can hear that far—and say: ‘Isn’t that nice?’ That’s what I said to Mrs. Baron. Some spiel, wasn’t it?”
Baron was glad that she turned to him for only the briefest scrutiny.