Miss Barnes shook her head.
“I want to be a governess, you know, not a nurse.”
Isabelle realized that a crisis was at hand.
“Sometimes I’m nice, aren’t I, Wally?” she appealed.
Miss Barnes could not have told why, but for the first time this abnormal, prissy child, with her self-assurance, and her impertinence, caught at her sympathies. Wally saw that she wavered.
“Suppose that we call it an experiment for a month. I’ll pay a hundred dollars a month. Come out with us this afternoon and try it. She’s the limit of a kid, but she’s got a lot of sense for her age, and maybe she’d be all right if somebody just gave her mind to her.”
“I’m willing to try it for a month, if I may have full charge of her. Would her mother agree to that?”
“Oh, Max is never home; besides, she never sees me,” spoke up the child.
“She does see you,” protested Wally.
Isabelle made no reply, but somehow Miss Barnes caught the situation—the sense of neglect, of the child’s loneliness.