"Don't you worry about that!" Bob jeered.
But Eve replied: "I've got to be home for lunch. Dad's going to be home."
If Emily didn't sleep at once, it wasn't because from the painted room came those stifled whispers and gigglings which so often annoyed Bob after dances. The girls seemed to have gone to sleep at once. But Emily kept thinking about Martha, and Mrs. Benton's sharp voice. The man, of course, would be leaving town at once. What would a journalist from Paris, a friend of Tchekhoff find to amuse him in a little Illinois city? And supposing he chose to stay all the summer, Martha could be trusted. She had such common sense. And such good taste, always. "It's just silly of me to worry about Martha," Emily thought, not once only but many times, till she was thoroughly tired of her foolish, wide-awake mind. "Thank goodness it's over!" she said to herself again and again. "Thank goodness that chapter's ended!"
A long interesting chapter had indeed ended that evening, more suddenly than Emily realized.
Chapter Three
The next day at first seemed like any other morning of the year, for Emily didn't get up as early as she had intended. There still was heavy dew lying on the thick greenness of the lawn when she sat down on the veranda to finish pitting the cherries. Afterwards she pattered about in the kitchen, tending the ruby mixture in the kettle till her cheeks were rosy red. And then she had filled the Mason jars, and screwed on the lids, and tested their inverted security, one by one, and put them in rows on the shelf to cool, interrupted from time to time by friends at the 'phone who must count over one by one the evening's triumphs. She was busy thinking that she really must take those fresh sash curtains up to the bathroom—it was scandalous, the condition of those hanging there—when the boy brought the raspberries she had ordered—far the best ones she had seen all the season. The girls, she thought, would love them for their breakfast. She prepared two saucerfuls, and got the pitcher of cream ready on the tray, and went up towards their room. Of course that was the way, Bob said, she spoiled Martha, always waiting on her, carrying something delicious up to her in the middle of the morning, when the girl ought to have been up and doing all the housework herself. Bob couldn't understand what a child Martha was, how unfit yet for responsibility. Wait till she had a house of her own. Just think of that painted room of hers, for instance. That showed what the child could do when she wanted to.
Emily opened the painted door quietly. On a day bed at one end of the room Eve was lying on her back reading, in sea-green figured silk pajamas which must have cost a good deal, one knee crossed over the other. Books were piled on the floor beside her, nearly as high as her low pillow.
She turned her head, and caught sight of the tray, and gave a shriek of delight. She called to Martha, who lay asleep on her bed-like device at the other end of the room, curled up like a child, not even a sheet over her. And Martha, sitting up in flesh-colored voile pajamas on the edge of the bed, stretching, yawning, pink and sweet, began:
"Oh, you rare lamb, mother! Isn't she a gem, Eve? No wonder dad says she spoils me! Where did you get them?" Eve had put a low table at Martha's side, and seated herself on the other side of it. But Emily maturely sought out the chair that was kept in the room as a concession to her dislike of floor cushions. She sat watching them gobble daintily, chattering away. Martha, who had made herself comfortable against a pile of cushions, her knees drawn up, and the saucer balancing on them, began wiggling her toes. She hadn't outgrown that infant habit yet, Emily enjoyed noticing. How she had watched this child's awakening with an impulse of delight every day, almost from her first week, till this morning, when she woke even yet delicately rosy and vividly red-lipped. Poor old Bob never got any fun out of it. Martha had disturbed him by waking too early, for years, and now she annoyed him by sleeping too late. But Emily wouldn't stop to sigh long over that, not these few summer mornings when she could enjoy it, now that the child was grown, and away months together. And just then Martha almost unconsciously bestirred herself and with the saucer in one hand and the spoon in the other, almost without ceasing to feed herself, went and pulled down a blind to shut the glare of the sunshine away from that rug of hers that tended to look too violently cerise. The girl, it seemed, couldn't sit up in bed eating berries for breakfast without thinking how the room might look if she should change it just a little.