"I'll be d—— if you shall," came the explosion, hot and loud. "I want to go fishing with you, Polk, my own self, and she ain't no good for nothing any way. You can't take her!"
"Henrietta!" I both beseeched and commanded in one breath.
"No, she ain't no good at all," was reiterated in the stormy young voice as Henrietta caught hold of the nose of the panting Hupp and stood directly in the path of destruction, if Polk had turned the driving wheel a hair's breadth. "Uncle Peter says that she is er going to turn the devil loose in Glendale, so they won't be no more whisky and no more babies borned and men will get they noses rubbed in their plates, if they don't eat the awful truck she is er going to teach the women to cook for their husbands. An' the men won't marry no more then at all, and I'll have to be a old maid like her."
Now, why did I write weeks ago that I would like to witness an encounter between Jane and Henrietta! I didn't mean it, but I got it!
Without ruffling a hair or changing color Jane stepped out of the Hupp and faced the foe. Henrietta is a tiny scrap of a woman, intense in a wild, beautiful, almost hunted kind of way, and she is so thin that it makes my heart ache. She is being fairly crushed with the beautiful depending weight of her mother and the responsibility of the twins, and somehow she is most pathetic. I made a motion to step between her and Jane, but one look in Jane's face stopped me.
"Dear," she said, in her rich, throaty, strong voice as she looked pleadingly at the militant midget facing her. Suddenly I was that lonesome, homesick freshman by the waters of Lake Waban, with Jane's awkward young arm around me, and I stood aside to let Henrietta come into her herit age of Jane. "Don't you want to come with us?" was the soft question that followed the commanding word of endearment.
"No!" was the short, but slightly mollified answer as Henrietta dug her toes into the dust and began to look fascinated.
"I'm glad you don't want to come, because I've got some very important business to ask you to attend to for me," answered Jane, in the brisk tone of voice she uses in doing business with women, and which interests them intensely by its very novelty and flatters them by seeming to endow them with a kind of brain they didn't know they possessed. "I want you to go upstairs and get my pocketbook. Be careful, for there is over a hundred dollars in the roll of bills—Evelina will give you the key to the desk—and go down to the drug store where they keep nice little clocks and buy me the best one they have. Then please you wind it up yourself and watch it all day to see if it keeps time with the clock in your hall, and if it varies more than one minute, take it back and get another. While you are in the drug store, if you have time, won't you please select me a new tooth-brush and some nice kind of paste that you think is good? Make them show you all they have. Pay for it out of one of the bills."
"Want any good, smelly soap?" I came out of my trance of absolute admiration to hear Henrietta ask in the capable voice of a secretary to a millionaire. Her thin little face was flushed with excitement and importance, and she edged two feet nearer the charmer.
"It would be a good thing to get about a half dozen cakes, wouldn't it?" answered Jane, with slight uncertainty in her voice as if leaving the decision of the matter partly to Henrietta.