Cis boarded with Nan. “Of course you couldn’t so much as think of living anywhere else, as long as I have room for you and want you so dreadfully! Besides, there’s baby!” Nan had said, and there was nothing to bring against her brief, convincing arguments.
“It isn’t as though I were going to be here permanently,” Cis said. “I think no one ought permanently to live with a married friend, but just till I go back to Beaconhite—or whatever I do next—I suppose it won’t be too hard on you, Mrs. Nan!”
Tom Dowling was a model of fraternal devotion after Cis was installed under Nan’s roof; he made opportunities to visit his sister to an incredible degree.
“Good old Tommy is a dear boy, but I wonder if he really thinks I don’t see through him!” Nan cried.
“Paraffine paper is thick beside his transparency; you’d be more than blind to miss seeing through him,” Joe answered.
Tom brought extraordinary things to the baby, toys which would require two more years of life for him to handle—a whipping top is not adapted to a boy two months old, nor is a tin locomotive run by sand that flows upon its wheels from a revolving sieve, hidden in its smokestack.
“Oh, Tommy, why, why!” Nan sighed one day when Tom produced a large cow, with a realistic moo when its head was moved, from a large package beneath his arm.
“He’ll grow to it; something to cut his ambition on, same’s you give him that bone thing to chew on for his teeth,” explained Tom, unabashed.
“Tom’s really a dear, Cis,” Nan said that night after Tom had gone home. “Mother is perfectly delighted that he has stuck to you so; she used to hope he’d see Louise Müller, a neighbor’s daughter, but he never did. Now mother is worrying for fear you won’t care about him. Do you think that you ever could, Cis darling? Of course all these cows, and tops and engines are not for baby; they’re for you, same as the candy is.”
“I don’t seem to enjoy the cow any more than Matt does; must I play with it, Nan? Tom didn’t offer it to me,” Cis sighed.