“I want thee to write thy mother to-day, Isabelle,” he said, sternly.
He told his wife of this conversation later.
“She writes volumes on Sunday,” he said, “now what does she do with it?”
“She is one of the strangest children we’ve ever had, Adam,” she answered.
“She is rather exhausting to me,” he said.
“She’s lived under abnormal conditions of some sort. I cannot seem to visualize her parents at all. She never speaks of them. She was so bitter and sullen when she came to us,” Mrs. Benjamin mused. “I must try to get her confidence about her parents, she may be needing help.”
“She came to thee just in time, my Phœbe.”
“Yes, that’s true. A little more and she would have been a bitter cynic at eighteen. Even now when she just begins to respond, like a frost-bitten plant, I am not sure of the blossom.”
“Hot-house growth, thee must remember.”