He did not move when Mrs. Leavitt came in, but he smiled at her confidently, and she smiled back at him.
Stephen, had he been there, would have risen and moved her chair, or brought her a footstool, and she would have thanked him with a smile a little less affectionate than the one she had just given negligent Hugh.
As she sat down she glanced about the large room anxiously. Then she sighed happily and fell to crocheting contentedly. Really the room was quite tidy. One book lay open—face down—on a table, but nothing else was awry, and that she would put in its place presently, when Richard carried Helen up to the nursery, as at bedtime he always did. Two dolls, one very smart, one very shabby, lay in shockingly latitudinarian attitudes on the chesterfield. But those she could not touch: it was forbidden.
Caroline Leavitt was a notable housewife, but sadly fussy. But she curbed her own fussiness considerably in Richard’s presence, and what of it she could not curb he endured with a good humor not commonly characteristic of him, for he appreciated its results of order and comfort. He was an orderly man himself, and it was only by his books that they often annoyed each other. He rarely left anything else about or out of place.
She very much wished that he strewed those on chair and window-seat less often, and he very much wished that she would leave them alone. But they managed this one small discord really quite admirably and amicably. To do him justice he never was reading more than one volume at a time. To do her justice she never moved that one except to put it primly where it belonged on the shelves. And he knew the exact dwelling-spot of every book he owned—and so did she. They were many, but not too many—and he read them all—his favorites again and again. She never opened one of them, but she kept their covers burnished and pleasant to touch and to hold. There were five editions of Dickens, and Bransby was reading for the tenth time his favorite author from the great-hearted wizard-of-pathos-and-humor’s Alpha of “Boz” to his unfinished Omega of “Edwin Drood”—Bransby’s book of the moment was “David Copperfield.” He had been reading a passage that appealed to him particularly when he had been interrupted by Grant’s intrusion. That had not served to soften the acerbity of the employer’s “Preposterous!”
“And what have you been doing?” Richard asked the dainty bundle on his knee.
“Playing.”
“With your cousins?”
She shook an emphatic head, and her curls glowed redder, more golden in the red and gold of the fire’s reflection. “Wiv Gertrude.”
Mrs. Leavitt stirred uncomfortably. But the father laughed tolerantly. He regarded all his daughter’s vagaries (she had several) as part of the fun of the fair, and quite charming. She rarely could be led to speak of her “make-believe” playmates, but he knew that they all had names and individualities, and that “Gertrude” was first favorite. And he knew that many children played so with mates of their own spirit’s finding. Gertrude seemed a virtuous, well-behaved young person, quite a suitable acquaintance for his fastidious daughter.