CHAPTER XVIII.
TURNING THE GLASS.
Johnny did a good deal of thinking, at odd times, the next day, and the more he thought, the more he saw why his mother had wanted him to think, before their next talk. As he picked up his injuries, and looked at them one by one, trying to do it as if he had been somebody else, they looked so very different, that he wondered how he could have been so blind, and when his mother came, as usual, for the talk, he was inclined to beg off from going into particulars. But he decided not to, for he was very certain that he had never yet been sorry for talking things out with his mother. So he faced the music, and declared himself ready to “begin at the beginning and go on to the end.”
“What was the first thing that went wrong?” inquired Mrs. Leslie, as she touched up Johnny’s hair with her nice soft fingers, adding, before he could answer, “You shall tell me how the things looked to you yesterday, and then I will turn the glass for you.”
“The first thing,” said Johnny, “was, that when I got up my room was cold—or no, not exactly cold, perhaps, but sort of chilly and uncomfortable, and when I opened the register, only cold, cellar-y air came up; and you know, mamma, that generally, when I turn on the heat, it’s warm in five minutes.”
“What a comfortable state of things!” said his mother, “to have, always, a nice warm room in which to wash and dress, and what a good thing it was that on the very night when, for the first time in weeks, the furnace fire went out, the weather was so mild that the house was only chilly, not really cold. Next!”
“A button came off my new jacket, and though it was the last one, and didn’t matter much, just for one day, it provoked me to have it come off then, when I was in a hurry.”
“It was such a good thing that it wasn’t the top button!” said his mother, brightly, “and that I had a new jacket at all, at all! Next!”