Like a vast proportion of the inhabitants of that lonely city, New York, the Applebys were unused to society. It is hard to tell which afflicted them more—sitting all day in their immaculate plastered and varnished room with nothing useful to do or being dragged into the midst of chattering neighbors who treated them respectfully, as though they were old.
Mother begged daughter to be permitted to dust or make beds; Father suggested that he might rake the lawn. But Lulu waggled her stringy forefinger at them and bubbled, “No, no! What would the neighbors think? Don’t you suppose that we can afford to have you dear old people take a rest? Why, Harris would be awfully angry if he saw you out puttering around, Father. No, you just sit and have a good rest.”
And then, when they had composed to a spurious sort of rest the hands that were aching for activity, the Applebys would be dragged out, taken to teas, shown off, with their well-set-up backs and handsome heads, as Lulu’s aristocratic parents.
“My father has been a prominent business man in New York for many years, you know,” she would confide to neighbors.
While the prominent business man longed to be sitting on a foolish stool trying shoes on a fussy old lady.
But what could he do? In actual cash Mother and he had less than seven dollars in the world.
By the end of two weeks Father and Mother were slowly going mad with the quiet of their room, and Lulu was getting a little tired of her experiment in having a visible parental background. She began to let Mother do the sock-darning—huge uninteresting piles of Harris Hartwig’s faded mustard-colored cotton socks, and she snapped at Father when he was restlessly prowling about the house, “My head aches so, I’m sure it’s going to be a sick headache, and I do think you might let me have a nap instead of tramping and tramping till my nerves get so frazzled that I could just shriek.”
With this slight damming of her flowing fount of filial love, Lulu combined a desire to have them appear as features at a musicale she was to give, come Saturday evening. Mother was to be in a “dear ducky lace cap” and Father in a frilled shirt and a long-tailed coat which Harris Hartwig had once worn in theatricals, the two of them presiding at the refreshments table.
“Like a prize Persian cat and a pet monkey,” Father said.
Against this indignity they frettingly rebelled. Father snarled, “Good Lord! I’m not much older than your precious dumpling of a Harris.” It was the snarl of a caged animal. Lulu had them; she merely felt misunderstood when they protested.