Timothy looked down at the trembling softened mouth, at the brimming tawny eyes of his Plain Little Sister. “Warren is going to Congress,” he said, letting Doromea’s ring slip on to his smallest finger. “I have heard that at such times—just before they go—they hardly know what they think. Everybody expects them to think something different, you see. I should not be surprised if they did not even know what they said—sometimes. There are stories——”
Patsy looked at him reproachfully. “You promised to leave out stories,” she murmured. “You were just beginning to be comforting.”
“Um-m! So I did—so I was, I mean. The fact is, I almost believe they forget what they have said, what they have thought, almost the minute they have said or thought it. They—they get tired, you see. They have to go off and make speeches, and their constituents keep dinning their importance at them, the importance of maintaining the dignity of their position, and that, you know; then they come home, a bit low and worn out with it, and—they’re just plain ordinary people, Congressmen—they lose their grip once in a while. They need——”
“Claire told you!” accused Patsy, though into her eyes had crept that same look as when she was singing the Angel to sleep. “You knew it was the day he came home from Boston, and went right away again.”
Timothy peered suddenly through his glasses at some one who was coming into the store. “I did have an idea it was that day,” he confessed—“one of those days, that is.”
“And of course,” Patsy’s voice gathered injury, “of all days his mother had to choose that one to come along. And you know, Timmie, when Warren’s mother comes along, it isn’t any suit-case party. There are trunks to be checked and a maid to be hustled into the baggage-car, or wherever it is they put ’em; and there’s a dog to be fought about—Warren’s mother simply shrieks if they suggest putting Toto in the baggage-car—and half a dozen smaller parcels to be lost and found a few times. Oh, I know!”—grimly. “I’ve had to play leading understudy in the scream; and there was Warren, tired to a frazzle—you know he was tired, Timothy——”
“I dare say he was,” Timothy was now the party of admission, “probably very tired.”
“Coming into his own house—— Oh, well,” Patsy straightened her sturdy shoulders and dabbed at one eye after the other. “It’s all over now. I’ve left him, and where’s the good of talking about what might have been? It’s only in stories that what might have been ever is. In a story, now”—she arraigned the writer—“you’d have the hero and the hero’s mother appear out of nowhere and fall on the—er—pseudo-heroine’s neck, and offer a diamond necklace, while pseudo-heroine exchanged apologies; and the whole family would trip happily home on one another’s arms. Isn’t that so? Isn’t that just the sort of impossible thing you have happen in those Plain stories of yours?”
Timothy smiled, that same smile that had overcome Doromea’s prejudice against marriage. “If you were writing a Plain story, wouldn’t you have it end that way?” he asked, regarding diamonds unseeingly from behind his glasses.
“I—I never wrote a story,” began Patsy, fumbling with her veil.