But she could not be just: "He belongs to us! And she prejudices him against us. I know she does. I said to him yesterday that her clothes weren't very fashionable. I just said it for fun; and he said, 'You shut up!'"
"What!" Johnny's father said, amused and horrified.
"I believe she likes him to be rude to me," Mary said.
Her jealousy of Miss Lydia had taken the form of suspicion; if Johnny was impertinent, if that shabby Miss Lydia meant more to him than she did—the rich, beneficent, adoring Mrs. Robertson!—it must be because Miss Lydia "influenced" him. It was to counteract that influence that she planned the Christmas visit; if she could have him to herself, even for a week, with all the enjoyments she would give him, she was sure she could rout "that woman" from her place in his heart!
"I sha'n't ask for what is my own," she told Carl; "I'll just say I'm going to take him for the Christmas holidays. She won't dare to say he can't come!"
Yet when she went to tell Miss Lydia that Johnny was coming, her certainty that the shabby woman wouldn't "dare," faded.
Miss Lydia was in the kitchen, making cookies for her boy, and she could not instantly leave her rolling-pin when his mother knocked at the front door. Mary had not been at that door since the September night when she had crouched, sobbing, on the steps. And now again it was September, and again the evening primroses were opening in the dusk. . . . As she knocked, a breath of their subtle perfume brought back that other dusk, and for an instant she was engulfed in a surge of memory. She felt faint and leaned against the door, waiting for Miss Lydia's little running step in the hall. She could hardly speak when the door opened. "Good—good evening," she said, in a whisper.
Miss Lydia, her frightened eyes peering at her caller from under that black frizette, could hardly speak herself. Mary was the one to get herself in hand first. "May I come in, Miss Sampson?"
"Why, yes—" said Miss Lydia, doubtfully, and dusted her floury hands together.
"I came to say," Mary began, following her back to the kitchen, "I came—"