“Yes, Hal. That’s Harry, who had everything on the tree and you nothing,” Connie replied. “Why don’t he live here, where there are bowls and things for the water to come in and go out, as we have in the city, and a hole in the floor for the heat to come through?”
She had spied a rusty register and was trying to open it, and her tone implied that this house was more to her taste than the farmhouse, and Kenneth felt a little hurt, but soon recovered himself and told her of the times, as he had heard of them from his mother, when his Uncle Morris lived there with his wife, a frail, lovely young girl who, knowing nothing of the world as her husband knew it, could not keep pace with his ideas and shrank from the gay company with which he filled the house.
“He had the best horses in the country for the men to ride,” Kenneth said, “and packs of dogs to hunt with in the fall, and my aunt had a maid and a nurse, who wore a cap, with great long strings, for Hal, until she died.”
“Oh-h!” Connie said, “that was splendid,” her natural love for luxury coming to the surface. “And your aunt died in that bed, and Harry was born in it?” she continued, walking round on three sides of the bedstead and stroking it with her hands, while there awoke in her heart a kind of pity for Harry, who, by the death of his mother, and something in his father, she couldn’t quite make out what, had been obliged to leave this handsome home for the farmhouse, where there was no mahogany furniture, no nurses with caps and streamers and no maids.
“I’d like to see Harry,” she said. “I wonder if I ever shall, and if I should like him as well as I do you. Give him my love, and say I’m sorry for him.”
“Sorry! Why?” Kenneth asked, and something in his tone made Connie look up quickly before she replied. “Sorry that his folks are dead,—his pretty mother and his father, who must have been a gentleman like those in New York,—and because he had to leave this handsome house.”
Kenneth was really hurt now. Here was flunkeyism he had not expected.
“Connie,” he said, in a voice not quite like the one which had called her to the tree, “would you rather live here with Harry than across the road with me?”
Connie thought a moment, and then replied: “You see, I’d like the nice things over here, but I don’t know Harry, and I am sure I like you the best and would rather be where you are. Do you think you can draw me on the sled this morning?”
She had made a rapid descent from the sentimental to the practical, but Kenneth was satisfied, and promised a sled ride in the afternoon, which was undertaken through the mud and over stones, until they ran into a rut and the sled was overturned, depositing Connie on the grass and soiling her blue cloak till, what with the mud stains and the sugar stains and grape juice, Mrs. Hart declared it spoiled and fit only for the old clothes man, who would get it as soon as she returned to New York.