"Anybody might be spoiled," Lois insisted. "I'm rather a sad example of the spoiled child myself. I speak, you see, from a weight of experience!"
The smile continued in lips and eyes. She was tremendously at ease and her ease was disconcerting.
"Phil has kept us delighted and bewildered. She was born with understanding; there's genius in the child!" said Nan, with warmth.
"Ah! I knew you realized that! Tom"—she spoke her discarded husband's name unwaveringly, smiling still—"Tom has not quite taken her at full value, though he has been—splendid. Amzi has been a dear angel to her,—but even he has never fully taken in the real Phil. But here, in this house"—she looked about, as though the more fully to place the room in evidence—"you have taken her into your hearts! And she needed the oversight of women—of women like you and Rose. You have been her great stimulus, the wisest of counselors. It seems almost as though I had left her on your doorstep! I am not so dull but that I see it all."
Nan colored deeply. Lois's suggestion, so bluntly put, that she had cast her child upon the Bartletts' doorstep aroused uncomfortable memories. After an instant's reflection Nan said:—
"Phil and her father have been unusually close; I don't believe Mr. Kirkwood has failed at any point in duty or sympathy. He is immensely proud of her development."
"Yes. But—he is not a woman! And there's a difference, if I haven't forfeited my right to an opinion on that point!"
She skirted the fringes, the dim borders of the past with the lightest step. She fumbled the keys of the closed doors as though they were silver trinkets on a châtelaine. In Nan's consciousness they seemed to tinkle and jingle softly in the quiet room.
"I thought of taking Phil away with me, to see the world,"—Nan felt a sudden tightening of the throat—"but I have decided against it. That will come later. In the work she wants to do it is better for her to stay here. If she learns Montgomery she will know the world! Does that sound a little studied? I am not a maker of phrases—far from it! But she has splendid talents?" she ended questioningly.
"Phil has the best mind of any girl I ever knew: she takes my breath away!" cried Nan.