And she does manage her beautifully, while I look on amazed. The first night after her arrival she invited me into her room, where I found her habited in a crimson dressing-gown, with her hair, which had grown very long, rippling down her back, and a silver-mounted brush in one hand and a hand-glass in the other. There was a light-wood fire on the hearth, for it was raining heavily, and the house was damp and chilly. Drawing a settee rocker before the fire, she made me sit down close by her, and, putting her arm around me and laying my head on her shoulder, she said, “Now, Chickie,—or rather Softie, which suits you better, as you seem just like the kind of girls who are softies,—now let’s talk.”
“But,” I objected, “Aunt Kizzy’s room is just below, and it’s nearly ten o’clock, and she will hear us and rap.”
“Let her rap! I am not afraid of Aunt Kizzy. She never raps me; and if you are so awfully particular, we’ll whisper, while I tell you all my secrets, and you tell me yours,—about the boys, I mean. Girls don’t count. Tell me of the fellows, and the scrapes you got into at school.”
It was in vain that I protested that I had no secrets and knew nothing about fellows or scrapes. She knew better, she said, for no girl could go through any school and not know something about them unless she were a greater softie than I looked to be.
“I was always getting into a scrape, or out of one,” she said, “and it was such fun. Why, I never learned a blessed thing,—I didn’t go to learn, and I kept the teachers so stirred up that their lives were a burden to them, and I know they must have made a special thank-offering to some missionary fund when I left. And yet I know they liked me in spite of my pranks. And to think you were stuffing your head with knowledge at Wellesley all the time, and I never knew it, nor Grant either! I tell you he don’t like it any better than I do. And Aunt Kizzy’s excuse, that you would have neglected your studies if you had known he was at Harvard, is all rubbish. That was not the reason. Do you know what the real one was?”
I said I did not, and with a little laugh she continued, “You are a softie, sure enough;” then, pushing me a little from her, she regarded me attentively a moment, and continued, “Do you know how very, very beautiful you are?”
I might have disclaimed such knowledge, if something in her bright, searching eyes had not wrung the truth in part from me, and made me answer, “I have been told so a few times.”
“Of course you have,” she replied. “Who told you?”
“Oh, the girls at Wellesley,” I answered, beginning to feel uneasy under the fire of her eyes.
“Humbug!” she exclaimed. “I tell you, girls don’t count. I mean boys. What boy has told you you were handsome? Has Grant? Honor bright, has Grant?”