“Oh, anything. Call her Ida.”
“She is too old for me to call her that,” replied Maria.
“Old? Why, dear, Ida is only a girl.”
“She is a good deal over thirty,” said Maria. “I call that very old.”
“You won't, when you get there yourself,” replied Harry, with another laugh. “Well, dear, suit yourself. Call her anything you like.”
It ended by Maria never calling her anything except “you,” and referring to her as “she” and “her.” The woman, in fact, became a pronoun for the child, who in her honesty and loyalty could never put another word in the place which had belonged to the noun, and feel satisfied.
Maria was very docile, outwardly, in those days, but inside she was in a tumult of rebellion. She went home with Miss Slome when she was asked, but she was never gracious in response to the doll-like smile, and the caressing words, which were to her as automatic as the smile. Sometimes it seemed to Maria that if she could only have her own mother scold her, instead of Miss Slome's talking so sweetly to her, she would give the whole world.
For some unexplained cause, the sorrow which Maria had passed through had seemed to stop her own emotional development. She looked at Wollaston Lee sometimes and wondered how she had ever had dreams about him; how she had thought she would like him to go with her, and, perhaps, act as silly as her father did with Miss Slome. She remembered how his voice sounded when he said she was nothing but a girl, and a rage of shame seized her. “He needn't worry,” she thought. “I wouldn't have him, not if he was to go down on his knees in the dust.” She told Gladys Mann that she thought Wollaston Lee was a very homely boy, and not so very smart, and Gladys told another girl whose brother knew Wollaston Lee, and he told him. After a little, Wollaston and Maria never spoke when they met. The girl did not seem to see the boy; she was more delicate in her manner of showing aversion, but the boy gazed straight at her with an insolent stare, as at one who had dared him. He told the same boy who had told him what Maria had said, that he thought Amy Long was the prettiest girl in school, and Maria was homely enough to crack a looking-glass, and that came back to Maria. Everything said in the school always came back, by some mysterious law of gravitation.
There was one quite serious difficulty involved in Aunt Maria's deserting her post, and that was, Maria was too young to be left alone in the house every night while her father was visiting his fiancée. She could not stay at Mrs. White's, because it was obviously unfair to ask them to remain up until nearly midnight to act as her guardian every, or nearly every, night in the week. However, Harry submitted the problem to Miss Slome, who solved it at once. She had, in some respects, a masterly brain, and her executive abilities were somewhat thrown away in her comparatively humble sphere.
“You must have the house cleaned,” said she. “Let the woman you get to clean stay over until you come home. She won't be afraid to go home alone afterwards. Those kind of people never are. I suppose you will get Mrs. Addix?”