The child hung her head. “’Taint in reason, suh, but Glen, she—she jes pintly b’lieves eva’thing Super tells her.”
“Ah, and Super tells her——”
She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Super, I heard him tell her yo’all was allus hollering fo’ money. I jes’ pintly know that’s a sinful lie, suh. Hit’s true in reason yo’ got to have plenty fo’ yo’ sweet and sightly cloze, but I know in time yo’ wouldn’t never be mean about hit!” She lifted her wise little monkey eyes from a rapturous contemplation of his purple and fine linen to give him a smile of confidence.
That was, perhaps, the thing which enraged the superintendent’s assistant more than anything else—the way in which Gloriana-Virginia and Beany and old Pap Tolliver, and a dozen other mill children adored him. She strove with them, conscientiously, but while they listened obediently they clearly disbelieved her. It was bitterly unjust, she told herself, after all her concern for them, her fight for them, after all that her father had done—to have them follow him as the youngsters of Hamelin had followed the Piper. A silly joke, a supposedly funny grimace, and they burst into shrieks of laughter scarce in their languid lives; a tray of ice-cream cones and they pattered after him like puppies; selling their birthright of hatred for a mess of patronage. Gloriana-Virginia raptly and tediously worshiped him, but there was a small grain of satisfaction in the fact that Henry Clay Bean, though sharing his cousin’s affection for the junior partner, evidently considered him as tiresomely silly as she did herself. Not a giggle, not a chuckle, not a smile, could young Mr. Peter Parker of Pasadena wrest from him, though he tried with the persistence of a vaudevillian plugging a new act.
“You know,” he said confidentially to Glen on one occasion, “I believe his mother marked him ... she might have been frightened by a funny paper....”
His prime favorites were Glory and a dusky shepherd of sheep, the Reverend Romeo Bird whom he had met in his first ramble through the negro quarters. He spent many long and lazy hours in the sunshine with him, drawing him out on theology and religion. They appeared to have much the same habit of body, young Mr. Parker from Pasadena and the Reverend Romeo, but while the youth was just as peaceful and as stationary in his mind, the dusky preacher was careful and troubled about many things.
He was almost overcome when the strange young gentleman took a seat in a rear pew of his church one Sunday morning, accompanied by Miss Janice Jennings who had brought her grandmother to the Bella Vista for a fortnight on their way home from Florida. She had met him on the green and leafy Avenue of The Hill with a squeal of delight.
“As I live, it’s Peter Pan! ‘The Playboy of the Western World!’ What are you doing here?”
“If it isn’t Babe Jennings!” He reflected her pleasure. “Look what spring has brought us! Greetings and hail!”
“But what, I ask, are you doing here?”