CHAPTER IV.
MARY'S PLAN.
During the following weeks, Mary was a very, very busy little girl. She had a wash day on the back porch when the suds flew in every direction, and Snowball fled upstairs to escape a bath not meant for her. The ironing was not so easy; but with help from the laundress on tucks and lace-trimmed ruffles, it was at last finished. The dolls themselves had their smiling faces well scrubbed with the nail brush, and their curls combed and brushed, after which they were dressed in their Sunday best and carefully laid in the big oak box which had been made for this purpose.
Next, Mary put her games in order and piled the boxes on the lowest shelf of her own little bookcase in her playroom; and then she sorted her books, putting all those which had only pictures and no reading matter in them on the shelf above the games; the A, B, C books and nursery rhymes on the one above that; and the story books, which she thought the twins would not use for some time, on the top shelf.
She did not finish her task until the Saturday before school opened, for there were many other things to be done every day. She could not neglect her pets nor her own little flower garden which she herself had dug and raked and hoed and planted with seeds, bulbs, and slips which Dan had given her. Every day, she chose the fairest blossoms to place before her mother's beautiful statue of our Blessed Lady.
But by far the greater part of her time was spent with her mother and little sisters. Each morning found her laying out the fresh clothing needed for the twins after their bath. Then she made ready their little beds, and Aunt Mandy always let her hold first one baby and then the other for a few minutes before tucking them in for their nap. It seemed to Mary a very strange hour to go to sleep. She thought every one ought to be quite wide awake by that time of the morning; but she had learned on the first day of her little sisters' lives that there is a great difference between babies and big girls of seven, just as there is between seven-year-olds and grown-ups.
The first of September came all too quickly. The thought of leaving the darling babies for five hours which she must spend at school every day made her wish that her mother would teach her at home as she had done the winter before. Not that Mary disliked school. The few months in the spring, which she had spent at a convent day school, had been such happy ones that she had been really sorry when school closed, and, until the babies came, had longed for September so that she might again sit at her little desk with Sister Florian smiling down at her and ever so many classmates with whom to romp at recess.
But now things were very different; and as she lay in her little brass bed the night before school opened, she wondered how her mother and Aunt Mandy could very well spare her during those long hours at the academy. Only that day, her mother had made her very happy by saying that she did not know what they would do without her. Since that was the case, Mary felt quite sure that it would be much better to have lessons with her mother.
She had done so well the winter before that, when she began to attend school, she was put in a class which had finished the First Reader before Easter and was just beginning the Second. During the summer, she had read all the lessons in that book, going to her mother for help with words that she could not quite make out. She had a habit of reading aloud even when alone, so that Mrs. Selwyn, passing from room to room, was often able to correct words which the child did not pronounce properly. The little girl laughed softly at the memory of one of her mistakes. She was reading a story of a little queen of England, and was calling one man in it the "Duck of Cucumbers." Her mother entered the room just in time to hear the dreadful mistake; and Mary soon saw that her duck was a duke—the Duke of Cumberland. From that time, she was more careful, for she knew that she would not like her father to be called a duck if he were a duke.
Yes, she was quite sure that she could do just as well, or even better, with her lessons at home if—and this was the important point—her mother had time to teach her. This thought had kept her from talking the matter over with her mother as she was in the habit of doing. She knew that the care of two babies takes a great deal of time and that her mother needed rest, too, when they were asleep. But what of her father and uncle? They could help her in the evenings. The Doctor often asked her to read to him after dinner, and why could she not read the lessons in the Third Reader?—for Mary had quite made up her mind that the Second Reader was much too easy for a school book. Sometimes, too, he teased her about the "tootums table." Yes, her uncle would surely help her with reading and number work, and her father with Catechism and spelling. She would slip down stairs to ask them before she went to sleep, and then surprise her mother with the plan in the morning.