“No, but I don’t respect her much.”
“Doesn’t thee?”—calmly.
“No, you can’t”—earnestly.
“And what does thee call thy father?”
“Wally.”
Mrs. Benjamin smiled. Here was all the clue she needed to the kind of parents Isabelle possessed.
“It may have been considered precocious, when thee was little, to call them so. But if I were in thy place, I would not do it now. It gives the wrong impression of thy manners. I think thee has very pretty manners,” she added.
Isabelle flushed with pleasure.
“You see, Max—my mother—doesn’t really care where I am, or what I do, so long as I’m not in her way, so I don’t know what to write her.”