“Well, I declare,” she exclaimed patronizingly, as he sprang eagerly up the steps, “if it isn’t Mistress Bryce’s little Billy! Why, Billy, child, you must have grown quite an inch since you went away. How is your dear mother to-day?”
Her tone and manner were indescribably superior, as though she were talking to a child of six, so that the amazed and abashed boy, instead of hugging her in his long arms as he wanted to, took the tips of the little fingers she put out to him, and stammeringly and solicitously asked if she had been quite well since he saw her last. She said it was a long time to remember, but she would do the best she could, and immediately began to count off on her fingers the number of headaches and toothaches she had had in the past two years; until Joscelyn, sorry for the boy’s unprovoked misery, stopped her abruptly, and finally sent Billy across the street to pour out his disappointment to Richard.
“Janet, you little barbarian, you have no heart!”
“Oh, yes I have,” replied that imperturbable young woman; “I have a great big heart for a grown man, but you see I do not particularly care for children who are still dangling at their mother’s apron string.”
Even a lecture from Richard, to whom she was much attached, did her no good; for all the while he was speaking she sat studying the effect of her high-heeled shoe on Betty’s blue footstool, and answered his peroration about Billy’s broken heart with the utterly irrelevant assertion that Frederick Wyley said she had the prettiest foot in the colonies. Did Richard agree with him? So Billy’s cause was not advanced any, and Richard began to advise him to think no more of this yellow-haired tormentor.
“I declare, Billy Bryce looks like a child with perpetual cramps,” Mistress Strudwick exclaimed to Joscelyn one day, when the lad passed the window where the two sat; and then she glanced down the room to her medicine-box.
“But it is a course of sweets, not bitters, that he needs,” laughed Joscelyn. “It’s his heart and not his stomach that ails Billy.”
“Half the lovesickness in the world is nothing but dyspepsia; mighty few cases of disappointed affection outlast a torpid liver.”
“I never heard you make such an unsentimental remark.”