Eliza spoke, smoothly and sweetly. “Dear Annie is singular,” said she.
“What the dickens do you mean by singular? I have known Annie ever since she was that high. It never struck me that she was any more singular than other girls, except she stood an awful lot of nagging without making a kick. Here you all say she is singular, as if you meant she was”—Tom hesitated a second—“crazy,” said he. “Now, I know that Annie is saner than any girl around here, and that simply does not go down. What do you all mean by singular?”
“Dear Annie may not be singular, but her actions are sometimes singular,” said Susan. “We all feel badly about this.”
“You mean her going over to her grandmother's house to live? I don't know whether I think that is anything but horse-sense. I have eyes in my head, and I have used them. Annie has worked like a dog here; I suppose she needed a rest.”
“We all do our share of the work,” said Eliza, calmly, “but we do it in a different way from dear Annie. She makes very hard work of work. She has not as much system as we could wish. She tires herself unnecessarily.”
“Yes, that is quite true,” assented Imogen. “Dear Annie gets very tired over the slightest tasks, whereas if she went a little more slowly and used more system the work would be accomplished well and with no fatigue. There are five of us to do the work here, and the house is very convenient.”
There was a silence. Tom Reed was bewildered. “But—doesn't she want to see me?” he asked, finally.
“Dear Annie takes very singular notions sometimes,” said Eliza, softly.
“If she took a notion not to go to the door when she heard the bell ring, she simply wouldn't,” said Imogen, whose bluntness of speech was, after all, a relief.
“Then you mean that you think she took a notion not to go to the door?” asked Tom, in a desperate tone.