He smiled sedately and shook his head with evasion. But Dorothy pointed the finger of scorn at him; she even whittled one finger with another and taunted him, shrilly:
“ ’Gene’s in love with Sheila! ’Gene’s in love with Sheila!”
“Am not!” he growled with a puppy’s growl.
“Are so!” cried Dorothy, jubilantly.
“Well, s’posin’ I am?” he answered, sullenly. “She’s a durned sight smarter and prettier than—some folks.”
This sobered Dorothy and crumpled her chin with distress. Like her mother, she had long ago recognized with helpless regret that she was not brilliant.
Mrs. Vickery, amazed at hearing the somber Eugene accused of so frivolous a thing as a love-affair, stared at him and murmured, “Why, ’Gene!”
Feeling a storm sultry in the air, she warned Dorothy that it was time to practise her piano-lesson. Dorothy, whose other name was Dutiful, made no protest, but began to trudge up and down the scales with a perfect accuracy that was somehow perfectly musicless and almost unendurable.
Mrs. Vickery knew that Eugene would speak when he was ready, and not before. She pretended to ignore him, but her heart was beating high with the thrill of that new era in a mother’s soul when she sees the first of her children smitten with the love-dart and becomes a sort of painfully amused Niobe, wondering always where the next arrow will come from and which it will hit next.
After a long while Eugene spoke, though not at all as she expected him to speak. But then he never spoke as she expected him to speak. He murmured: