The swathed figure rose up in majesty, and a pair of half-open, sleepy eyes became visible in a yawning face.
“Well, I’ll be hanged!” said Jack. “If you didn’t actually wake me up to ask where mother is. What do you think I am! A supernatural dreamer, with visions of everything mother does floating around my bed? Think I can see all over the house with my eyes shut?”
Jack flounced back, and recomposed his long limbs for slumber.
“You ought to be up, anyway, by this time,” declared Barbara, eyeing him with cold disapproval. “There are plenty of things that you could do to help.”
She walked down the stairs, puzzling over the strange lack of system that she saw everywhere about her. There was Jack, lying at his ease in his room, with a superb disregard of responsibilities. She caught a glimpse of Gassy sitting in the dusty, disorderly library, reading the story from which she had been forcibly separated the evening before at bedtime. And finally, as she reëntered the dining-room, she stumbled over the Kid, who was arranging plates, taken from the uncleared dining-table, in a neat line on the carpet.
“Don’t upset my ships!” he roared, as Barbara unconsciously crunched a butter-plate under her erring tread.
She stared in horror at the débris; then, sweeping the plates up, to the accompaniment of shrieks from the youngest Grafton, she sat down on a chair and took her struggling little brother on her lap.
“Charles Grafton, listen to me!” she said firmly but not angrily, remembering the pedagogic articles on “Anger and the Child,” and the extracts which had filled a large college note-book. “Charles! What do you mean by doing such a dreadful thing as this? Answer, immediately.”
It was while she was trying to understand his stormy articulations that Mrs. Grafton appeared, and sank down wearily in a chair near the door. The Kid immediately wriggled from his sister and ran to his mother, weeping.
“Just see what this boy has done!” cried Barbara. “I picked up half these plates from the floor. I never saw such a child! This table ought to have been cleared long ago, anyway.”