The Blue Hair Ribbon
"I've been lookin' over your things to-day and gettin' 'em ready. The moths has ate your Winter flannels and you'll have to get more. I've mended your coat linin's and sewed on buttons, and darned and patched, and I've took Barbara North's blue hair ribbon back to her—the one you found some place and had in your pocket. You mustn't be careless about those things, Roger—she might think you meant to steal it."
"What did Barbara say?" he stammered. The high colour had mounted to his temples.
"She didn't know what to say at first, but she recognised it as her hair ribbon. I told her you hadn't meant to steal it—that you'd just found it somewheres and had forgot to give it to her, and it was all right. She laughed some, but it was a funny laugh. You must be careful, Roger—you won't always have your mother to get you out of scrapes."
Roger wondered if the knot of blue ribbon that had so strangely gone back to Barbara had, by any chance, carried to her its intangible freight of dreams and kisses, with a boyish tear or two, of which he had the grace not to be ashamed.
"Your pa was in the habit of annexin' female belongin's, though the Lord knows where he ever got 'em. I suppose he picked 'em up on the street—he was so dreadful absent-minded. He was systematic about 'em in a way, though. After he died, I found 'em all put away most careful in a box—a handkerchief and one kid glove, and a piece of ribbon about like the one I took back to Barbara. He was flighty sometimes: constant devotion to readin' had unsettled his mind.
"That brings me to what I wanted to say when I first started out. I don't want you should load up your trunk with your pa's books to the exclusion of your clothes, and I don't want you to spend your evenin's readin'."
"I'm not apt to read very much, Mother, if I work in an office in the daytime and go to law school at night."
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