"Oh, I'm waiting, all right. I've always been waiting. You might hurry her along a bit, old girl!"
So Bob had waited all that day, without seizing more than two or three fleeting opportunities to "roast" her about that report, and he was still waiting the next noon in a rather abused mood for some of those signs of promise that his wife was always talking about. He was thinking about it as he walked up to dinner, when he suddenly shuddered to recognize his car, that he ought to have been riding home in, disguised by loads of flowers, overflowing with bobbed heads, young arms and joys and shriekings, turned violently—to escape crashing into a milk truck—up over the curb into a neighbor's lawn, just missing an altogether unyielding elm.
Martha was clever enough at least to avoid her father until dinner was on the table. Emily, helping the crippled old maid-of-all-work in the dining room, heard them at it as they came in toward the table.
"I say you were coming around that corner at forty miles an hour!" Then suddenly stopping: "What's this, Emily! No company for dinner? Where's all the gang? My g-o-oodness! this is a treat! I told you, Martha——!"
Bob spoke with the abruptness of a man who sells hundreds of cars a year, and repairs thousands while their drivers wait. And Martha, when she bothered to reply to him, spoke like a siren from some island of lotus eaters. Her sentences, instead of ending crisply, trailed away rather, and were lost in indifference. Emily scarcely knew what to make of her, at times, nowadays. She had always been a quiet child. On the occasions of high delight in her childhood, which made other children laugh and shout and dance about with glee, little Martha had always stood still, her hands clasped together, and shone all over, with her gray eyes, her little pursed-up mouth, her whole little soft face. The shouting, squealing, roaring sort of little rejoicers are lovely, too, Emily had often thought. But this distinctive rising into shining quietness which was so characteristically Martha, had been a rare and fascinating kind of infant charm. And now, in the blossom of her maidenhood, Martha seemed instinctively to have chosen quietness, and passivity for her weapon of defense and conquest. When she flirted, and when she quarreled with her father, her voice was like the falling of "tired eyelids on tired eyes." Emily had said to Bob, perplexed by Martha's unconciliatory behavior to one whom Emily would have called in her youth an admirer, "Johnnie just wants to grab Martha and give her a shaking when she looks at him like that." And Bob replied, indignantly: "You bet your bottom dollar he does! That's why she does it!"
And now Martha, consuming a chop with haste, displeased with her father's outburst, lifted her eyes slowly toward him and looked at him casually for a moment, and then, letting her eyelashes fall, devoted herself to the chop, as she might have given a moment's careless attention to an English sparrow perched on the window sill of the house across the road. And she drawled, unperturbed to the last degree:
"I think you're mistaken, dad. I don't believe I was driving that fast. And, anyway, I stopped in time. A miss is as good as a mile, I suppose."
"Not with my car, it isn't. Not by a damned sight! You'd think it was a Lizzie the way you treat it. A mile is better than a miss with you, and don't you forget it! If this happens again, I won't let you drive the car all summer!"
"I said I was sorry, didn't I? I said I wouldn't do it again. You never saw me do a thing like that before, did you?"
"No, I didn't, young lady. You didn't imagine I was anywhere about, or I wouldn't have seen you this time, either! I give you credit for that much sense, at least!"