More Bed-Time Stories

by Louise Chandler Moulton

"Yellow!" Kathie clapped her hands to her ears. "What did I ever do to make you think I would wear a horrid yellow gown?"

"Oh, was it red you said you wanted?"

"Worse and worse. You talk like a Hottentot. My gown is to be blue, soft, and lustrous, like a summer sky, and I am to look in it,—well, you shall see on Christmas Eve."

Then, with half a dozen good-by kisses, the father of this only child—happy, easy-going, and too indulgent—took himself off down town, and Kathie danced away to the sewing-room to find her mother and inform her of her success.

Kathie Mason, at sixteen, was a girl bright, and sweet, and bonny enough to tempt any parent to a little over-indulgence. She had soft, sunny, yellow hair; and lovely, dark brown eyes; with a look in them that kept saying, "Oh, be good to me!"; a delicate, flower-like face; and a mouth red as Fair Rosamond's, which has long been dust now, but which poets and painters raved about centuries ago. She had a graceful little figure, and a clear, fresh young voice; and she had a heart, too, which was in the right place, though she herself was almost a stranger to it. She loved beauty dearly, whether in books, or nature, or human faces, or blue silk gowns, and it was just as natural to her to be a picture, whatever way she looked or moved, as it was to be Kathie.

As she danced along she was humming a verse of a gay little French chanson, where some lover said his love was like a rose; and you thought it might have been written about herself, only Kathie had no thorns. As she drew near the sewing-room she stopped, for her mother and the dress-maker were talking busily. Miss Atkinson was a pathetic little woman, with eyes which looked as if the color had been washed out of them by many tears, a thin, frail body, and a voice not complaining, but simply plaintive. Somehow Kathie hated to break in upon the slow pathos of those tones with her blue silk ecstasy, so she stood leaning against the door for a few moments and waited.

"You see," the little woman was saying, "it was a great pull-back, my being sick two months in the summer, and then my brother being so much worse. But it will all come right, somehow. If I can manage to get Alice clothed up so she can go to school, I shall be thankful; for she's a bright child, and it's too bad to have her wasting her time. But then, food and fire must come first, and if people are sick they are sick, and two hands can't do any more than they can."

There was nothing to oppose to this mild fatalism; so Kathie's mother only said, very sympathizingly, that it was hard, and that it seemed as if, with her sister and her sister's child to support, Miss Atkinson had all she could do before, without undertaking any new responsibilities for the ailing brother and his family.