"I don't think I would mind, dear," said poor Eiley, who began to wish that she had left Marion where she was. "You see the children have come along so near together they have been more like brothers and sisters than anything else. It may not have been the best way, but we can't help it now, and I don't think I would try."
Stanley was a year older than Marion. She was in the Senior class at Round Springs, and would graduate in another year, but she did not stand on her dignity at all. She walked and rode, gathered specimens with the older boys, talked metaphysics and philosophy with Harry, music with Bessy, and dolls with little Eileen Overbeck with equal willingness and apparently equal pleasure. Her mother would not allow her to do any lessons in vacation-time except her music, and Stanley took possession of the piano in school-hours, working hard at exercises and studies of all sorts, and now and then disporting herself in a Strauss waltz or a song. She was fully prepared to find a pleasant companion in Marion, and met her with simple cordiality.
Marion wished to respond, but she was thinking of herself and the impression she was likely to make, and consequently she was at once awkward and condescending.
"Aunt Eugenia doesn't seem as well as usual, I think," remarked Stanley at dinner one day. "She seems nervous and more like being irritable than I have ever seen her. She didn't even care about the snuff that I brought her."
"I have noticed a change for several days," said Mrs. Van Alstine. "She is uneasy all the time, as if she missed something, and she doesn't have a nap in the afternoon, as she used to."
"That won't do," said Mr. Van Alstine. "We must have the doctor over. I'll go in and see her after dinner."
Mr. Van Alstine was as good as his word, but Aunt Eugenia would not hear of the doctor.
"It is nothing, Ezra, only—Well, the fact is, I suppose, I miss my snuff."
"Your snuff!" said her nephew. "And how happens it that you haven't any snuff? The Scotchman will go after some directly."
"No, thank you, Ezra. The truth is, Marion has said so much about its being a bad habit and making me so disagreeable, and that it was inconsistent in a Christian to use tobacco, that I thought I would try to do without it."