CHAPTER TWELVE
Which shows Miss Bentley recovering from a fit of what Uncle Bob calls Cantankerousness; in which a shipwrecked letter is brought to light, and Dr. Prue is called again to visit the child of the Park Superintendent.
"And he turned into a splendid prince (he had been one all the time really, you know), and he laid all his riches at Violetta's feet, and made her a princess, because she had been true to him through thick and thin."
Virginia's voice rose in triumphant climax.
"That's all very fine in a fairy-tale, Virginia, and it is an extremely good one for a little girl like you to make up out of her own head. But you know in real life it is different." Margaret Elizabeth gazed pensively into the fire.
Virginia, prone upon the hearth-rug, was disposed to argue what she did not understand. "How different?"
"Well, in a fairy-tale you can have things as you want them, but in real life you get tangled up in what other people want, and with duty and common sense; and when you determine to follow your—" Margaret Elizabeth was going to say "heart," but changed to "intuitions," "you are left high and dry on a desert island."
Virginia was to be excused if she failed to make head or tail of this. "I wish the Candy Man would come back," she remarked irrelevantly. "He was much nicer than Tim. He liked fairy-tales. He said he was coming some time."
"Oh, did he?" said Miss Bentley.
The reference to a desert island, and a disposition to quarrel with fairy-tales, go to show that while she was decidedly more like herself than in the last chapter, her recovery was not yet complete. In fact Margaret Elizabeth was suffering from the irritability that so often accompanies convalescence. Cantankerousness was Uncle Bob's word for it, and he defended it with all the eloquence of which he was master, his finger on the page in the dictionary where it was to be found in good and regular standing.