And she hasn’t any mind.
She was born stupid, achieved stupidness, and had stupidity thrust upon her,—all three. I found her pouring water on the gas-stove to put out the burner, the other day. She’ll have us all gas-fixiated, if we don’t watch out.”
“That was several days ago,” laughed Barbara. “She’s developed a stage beyond that, now. In fact, she’s devoted to the gas-stove. I can hardly prevail upon her to turn it off at all. She announced to me yesterday that it was the handiest thing she ever saw,—that you ‘only had to light it once a day, and fire all the time.’ Think what our gas-bill is likely to be under her tender ministrations!”
“Her awe of it is evidently great,” said Jack. “She asked Gassy this morning if she was named after the stove. ‘I don’t wonder they named you that,’ she said; ‘I ain’t never seen nothing like it. W’y, if I wuz to go home and tell ’em I turned on a spit, and there wuz the fire, they’d say I wuz a liar!’”
“She’s an idgit!” ejaculated Gassy; “a born idgit!”
Gassy’s epithet clung. It was used by the family with bated breath and apprehensive glance, but still it was used. No other title seemed appropriate after that was once heard, and her Christian name sank into oblivion from disuse. It was never employed except in her presence. And the Idgit certainly earned her title. She put onions in the rice-pudding; she melted the base off of the silver teapot by setting it on the stove; she cut up potatoes peeling and all, for creamed potatoes, explaining that “some liked ’em skinned, an’ some didn’t”; she left the receiver of the telephone hanging by its cord for hours, until the doctor’s patients were desperate, and so many complaints poured in at the central office that a man was sent to repair damages; she turned the hose on the walls and floor of the kitchen to facilitate scrubbing, until the whole room was deluged, and overflowed like the Johnstown flood; she answered the doorbell by calling through the dining-room and the front hall that “no one’s to home”; she put the bread sponge in the oven of the range, and then built a fire above it to “raise it quick” (the oven was full of burned paste before Barbara discovered the time-saving device); she ladled the gold-fish out of the aquarium to feed them, and left the four red, dead little corpses on the library mantel. “They’re too pretty to sling out,” she said.
Barbara wavered between exasperation and amusement during the twenty-four hours of the day. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with her,” she confided to her father one evening. “I thought that intelligence was a part of the make-up of every human being; but Addie either has no place for it in her identity, or else the place that is there is empty. I gave her a recipe yesterday,—how she ever learned to read is beyond my comprehension,—that called for ‘six eggs beaten separately.’ Addie emptied one from its shell, beat it, emptied another, beat that, and followed the same proceeding with the whole six.”
“I can tell something funnier than that,” said Dr. Grafton. “I telephoned over here from the livery stable this afternoon, and asked Addie to ‘hold the phone’ until I could read a message to her. Central rang off before I could read it, and then I couldn’t get connections again. So I came over home to give it to her, twenty minutes later, and found her obediently still holding the receiver.”
“The last teller of tales has the best chance,” chuckled Jack. “What message did you give the Idgit to give Miss Bates when she called here yesterday?”
Barbara considered. “That I was in, but that I was engaged, I think,” she said finally.