“Now see what you’ve done, Spitfire!” said Jack.
Two months before, this exhibition of temper would have been made the subject of a moral lecture from Barbara. Now she only looked sober as she bent to help Gassy pick up the leaves. “Poor book,” she said; “you’ve given it what Jack deserved. That’s hardly fair, is it? Come, Boy, help repair the damage that you caused. No, David, you needn’t help; I want you to go and get ready for school.”
“Must I?” pleaded David.
“I think you had better.”
The little boy raised himself from the couch with a long-drawn sigh that Barbara remembered days afterward. “All right, if you say so,” he said: “I’ll change my waist now.”
The house seemed very still after the children had trooped out to swell the procession of young people headed toward the school. Barbara reflected with relief that their departure would lighten her labors. With the Kid at kindergarten, and the others away from home, she could count on a tidy house and an unbroken opportunity for work.
“It doesn’t seem very affectionate to be glad that they are gone,” she said to herself. “Mother always seemed to be sorry when our vacation was over. But it is a relief to have a quiet house, and a chance to work without a dozen interruptions an hour. Perhaps, after I get things into running order, I shall have time to do a little writing every morning while they are out of the way. Then—”
The thought of the pile of rejected manuscripts lying upstairs in the corner of her desk stopped her dreams. “I can’t even write any more,” she thought bitterly. “This kitchen drudgery takes the life out of my brain as well as my body. I must find time to put the early morning freshness into something besides dishes.”
It was with this idea that she carried a writing-pad and her fountain pen out to the side porch an hour later. An orderly house and an undistracted mind seemed to make conditions favorable for writing, and the scanty bits of philosophy that had sifted their way into the gayeties of the past fortnight began to find utterance in best college rhetoric. The lust of writing stole over the girl, and for two hours she wrote steadily, utterly oblivious to everything.
The sound of the opening of the gate roused her. It was Jack, coming up the gravel walk with David in his arms,—an inert little David, whose arm hung heavily over his brother’s, and whose hand swung limply at the end. The fountain pen rolled unheeded off the porch.