CHAPTER IX
“WITHOUT”
THE alarm-clock under Barbara’s pillow sent forth a muffled rattle, like a querulous old woman with tooth-ache, complaining from beneath her bandages. The girl turned over in bed and sighed. A moment later the town-clock struck six, with insistent note, and after a sympathetic delay of a minute more, the living-room clock below sounded its admonition. Sleepily and reluctantly Barbara drew forth the alarm-clock to make sure of the worst.
“It’s always six o’clock,” she said crossly. Then she slammed the offender down upon the bed, and set her bare feet upon the floor with a thud that betokened no happy morning spirit. Oh, for those luxurious days at college when a closed transom and an “engaged” sign upon the door insured sufficient slumber after a night of school-girl dissipation! Not since the nightmare of housekeeping had attacked her rest, two months before, had “Babbie the Nap-kin,” as she was jocularly known at college, had enough sleep. This starting the day with heavy eyes, and body that sighed for rest, was a new thing. How had her mother done it, all these years? Probably as she, Barbara, was doing it now;—there was no one else to share it with her.
The same old routine,—Barbara wearily went over it: Unlock the doors, open the windows; light the fire, put the kettle on, take the food out of the ice-box, skim the milk, grind the coffee, make the toast, set the table, rouse the sleepers. Every one of the mornings in the year her mother had done it, or superintended the doing of it. Three hundred and sixty-five mornings, for twenty-three years. 8395 times! Barbara shuddered.
It was hot and stuffy downstairs. The chairs were set about at untidy angles, and the sun blazed in fiercely at the window. The kitchen door-knob was sticky to the touch, and a bold cockroach ran across the back porch as she opened the door. Was this summer hotter and more disagreeable than usual, or was it possible that Mrs. Grafton had been responsible for the cool, shaded rooms and the fresh morning air that had always greeted Barbara when she arrived upon the scene of action? For the third time in her experience the girl considered herself with misgiving. Was it possible that housekeeping was a science, instead of merely an occupation,—to be learned by study, and experiment, and experience, just like philosophy? Was it even possible that she, Barbara Grafton, called “The Shark” at college, was, for the first time in her life, to fail miserably in a “course”?
Dr. Grafton and David were the only members of the family who responded to the breakfast-bell. The doctor drank his under-done coffee and ate his over-done toast without comment; the small boy bent contentedly over a bowl of bread and milk. Barbara herself ate nothing.
“What’s the matter, girl?” asked her father. “Aren’t you well?”
“I’m all right, only not hungry.”