“You get in and show him how,” jibed Tina, with a delighted childish giggle. She jumped up from the ottoman, swooping her arms down to embrace the mother, who still sat sewing. “All right momsey, I’m to go to the dance; it’s all settled. Let me try Tweetums, Elinor!” she ran over to the cage, brushing her sister to one side. Tina seemed to take the light with her when she moved; it clung around her bright hair, and radiated from her fair skin and her dear eyes, and even lurked, shimmering, in the folds of her sky-blue gown. She stood with upraised head touching the gilded wires of the cage, talking in tender, caressing sound to the little feathered rebel, with a lure of sugar crumbs upon her red lips, until he came to peck at them. What made the transition—what magic was hers? There was a sudden splash, a shower of raindrops over her laughing, triumphant face as she started back, before she ran from the room. Tina had the winning way.
“I thought I heard Tina in here,” said a taller sister, entering by another door. Annette was perhaps not so pretty as the other two, but she had a large, blonde gentleness, very reposefully attractive. She had been engaged for four years to a charming fellow, whose only lack was that of money, consequent on a dependent mother and sisters. The lovers had preserved the spirit of romance by varying the manifestations of it—for the last twelvemonth spending their time with note-book and pencil, raptly ciphering out the future possibilities of a livelihood for two on the narrowest known limit. Although Annette and Joseph had seen each other nearly every evening during this probation her soft eyes suffused and her soft cheeks rosed as virginally on the thousandth time he appeared as on the first.
She held up a garment now as she spoke. “I want to give this new waist to Tina to mend. Just see where she’s torn it! I found it under her desk.”
“Now, Annette, if you’ve been putting her room to rights again——!” Elinor held up her hands in despair.
“I couldn’t stand seeing it the way it was,” said Annette apologetically.
“Yes, of course, that’s the way you spoil her. I’m sure you and I were brought up very differently. Here, give me a needle and thread, she’ll never mend that waist. Mother, now you’ve let Tina think she’s going to the dance, that settles it; you can’t go back on it now: but I think she ought to understand that this is absolutely the last time.”
“She seemed to take it so to heart,” said the mother weakly. She tried to rally herself intelligently. “Of course I don’t mind her accepting invitations occasionally; she’s nearly eighteen; but the girls who are not out have more going on than the girls that are. And that young Fanshawe—he seems a stupid sort of a boy, to me; but he does such reckless things I do not like to have Tina with him.”
“Oh, mother, he’s all right, really, he’s only young.” Annette’s tone was gently protesting. “He’s so much richer than the others that he can do more things—that’s all; she’ll soon get tired of him. All the boys in that set are devoted to Tina. When a girl is as pretty as she is——” The three looked at each other in the pause that followed, but each saw only the image of the beloved youngest.
Tina, indeed, was in that stage of rebellion at life in which she could see no meaning in any law of her elders; her young desire controverted all their worldly experience. What was the use of saying she couldn’t want to do things when she patently did? Refusal hardened her; reason was only that which darkeneth understanding. She resented any appeal to her affection, not because she had little, but because she had so much that she fought being mastered by it, and thrown into those hated fits of weeping and contrition. She stormily wanted what she wanted. Yet if she were left untrammelled she showed unexpected glimpses of a heart passionately loving and tender; an undercurrent as old as the world, as deep as life, profoundly affecting. Tina was the only one of the family who had “temperament,” a fact dimly perceived only in the desire to shield the child from something unknown. At present there was the uneasy feeling that this something might be a youthful attachment for Francis Fanshawe.
To the critical eye, young Fanshawe, an orphan, was simply a stolid and uninteresting young fellow of twenty-one, tall, heavily built, and reddish in hair and complexion. Elinor characterized him as “thuddy,” a word coined by the family to indicate the quality of weight. He had no expression, and was tongue-tied in the presence of his elders, even the sympathetic Annette failing to elicit response from him, though with the youth of his own “set” Francis seemed to be voluble enough in the loud exchange of catch phrases and slangy interjections which made their happy intercourse, and he and Tina could talk by the hour together in a murmuring undertone. He was rather dangerously well off in a community where only the fathers had money, a fact in itself calculated to affect his reputation. But his light-blue eyes could look squarely into yours, and he had a good grip of the hand. He was undoubtedly a nice enough boy if you liked that kind, though Elinor could only wonder that anybody did. She herself only liked people who interested and stimulated.