“The twins have only our back yard,” reflected Sheila, her wide blue eyes very serious. “Hawley got them swings and a sand-pile, but—it’s always city for them; and they’re four years old now.”
“Why don’t you send them to the Park—Central Park, I mean?” Patsy’s impulsive sympathy darted at once to the most obvious idea.
“I couldn’t go with them,” said Sheila, simply. “They would have to play with their governess, and they wouldn’t like that. You see, when we come home, either Hawley or I, we can always run down to the yard with them right away. But it’s rather grim and stiff for them, poor dears, with only trees in tubs and a fence all round. Some day perhaps we can afford to live in the country.”
“Oh!” Patsy’s glance was rather blank. If she had not known Sheila to be simply a society person, she would have suspected her of trying to make an epigram. But, as Ellen said, Sheila paid no attention to herself—it would never have occurred to her to attempt being clever.
“How was the new machine?” asked Patsy, steering away from what she did not understand.
Sheila’s lovely little face beamed. “Hawley was so pleased over it! He says it’s a rip-snorter—the bulliest engine he’s had yet!” Hawley’s large enthusiasm came quaintly from the small, almost infantile mouth. “I’m so delighted; though it—it does go rather fast. I had to hold on to the rail all the way out.”
“I’m crazy over them when they go fast,” protested Patsy, relapsing into her old sportsman vernacular. “At the Vanderbilt Cup race——”
“Ah! You saw the play, then? You remember——” and the babyish features lit up with a something that made downright Patsy blink with surprise, as Sheila went on to enumerate certain scenes in the play, certain thrilling passages—quoting, explaining, mimicking—so eagerly that one had not the heart or any longer the interest to explain that one had meant the actual race itself.
Patsy listened absorbedly. “And I never had thought she could talk,” she told Doromea afterward. “But then she really didn’t talk; something just talked through her.”
The something kept on talking, until Ellen came and “shooed” them downstairs to the porch and Doromea. “Here I’ve been waiting for days to see Sheila, and now you two go off and look at a year-old baby the whole while! Tell me, Sheila, when are you going to free yourself of clubs and bridge and suffrage leagues and theatres and things?”