There was nothing sanctimonious about Felicia's handling of them. Like the old woman in the shoe, she scolded them "roundly." The Sculptor Girl still laughs over a never-to-be-forgotten-day, when Felice drifted into the nursery, her arms outstretched in droll swimming motions.
"Dulcie Dierckx! How dare you let me find you weeping again! When Pandora is almost here! I do declare you'll have to learn to swim and so will all of us if you're going to drip tears regularly, every day at five thirty—Molly says you're only hungry, nobody else is snivelling all over the place—"
"No, the lawyer c-c-cusses—" sobbed Dulcie.
"Then learn to cuss!" admonished Felice, but her eyes twinkled and the emotional Sculptor Girl's eyes twinkled back through her tears—all of them were for Felice, if that despotic person had only known it. For the young lawyer had been upstairs pouring out his despondent feelings on Dulcie,
"She has just about eight days more before she'll be dumped in the gutter, for there's no possible way out—"
A limp lot they were in the late afternoon, after they'd struggled all day with their unruly Muses and Pegasuses!
"Wouldn't it be droll," Felice asked Molly one day, "if I came home too tired some night and mixed them all up! And told the Inventor I thought his feeling was poetic and told Dulcie that she was getting a wonderful color into her work and talked about soul to the Cartoonist!" Sometimes it seemed to her that of all of them the Architect, with his head bent over his drawings under his evening lamp, typified the hopelessness of the whole scheme, as he wrought so painstakingly at his detailed drawings for the re-construction of the house, drawings that couldn't possibly ever be used! From some absurd fragment he would dreamily reconstruct—his adventures filled the house with nervous laughter.
As on the night when he discovered, high above the doorway in the bare old drawing-room, an ornate bit of copper grating that had escaped the clutches of the dirty filthy heathen. Most of the quaint old hot-tair registers—they had been wonderful bronze things—had been removed and ugly modern ones that did not fit had been substituted. But this one grating—a delightful oval affair whereon chubby Vestal Virgins lifted delicate torches, had remained intact. The reason was plain enough, it was almost impossible to dislodge it. Even with the lawyer and the Cartoonist to help him, the enthusiastic Architect, balanced dangerously on one of Janet's ladders, could scarcely pry it loose. It was just after dinner. It had rained during the day so that the little garden was too damp for the evening and the whole household lingered idly in the bare drawing-room to tease the Architect. When the register was finally loosened, showers of ancient dust descended. The room echoed as with one mighty sneeze. Janet shrieked her dismay.
"Now look at the du-urt!" she wailed, "It's fairly in loomps and choonks!"
The Cartoonist stopped with an heroic sneeze to lift one of the "choonks." He dusted the bit of metal and bowed before Felicia.