“Oh don’t, oh dear, what shall I do? You’re so queer, Flaxie Frizzle!”
“Well, if you go on in this way, I shall be obliged to take Ethel out of the room. Have you no judgment at all, Fanny Townsend?”
“Oh dear, oh dear, I shall die laughing! shall have to go home! If you could see just how you look, Flaxie Frizzle! Good-by. I can’t help it,” said Fanny, reeling out of the door.
Mary drew a long sigh. “Now come to me, Ethel. This is a dreadful thing, and you’re a perfectly awful child; but it will not do to speak to mother about it, when she has pneumonia, and a blister on the chest. She said I must take care of you.”
Ethel did not stir. Mary paused and gazed reproachfully across the room at her, not knowing in the least what to say next. She had never before undertaken a case of discipline, and rather wondered why it should be required of her now. But she had been given “full authority over the children,” and what did that mean if she was not to punish them when they did wrong?
To be sure Julia’s headache might be over to-morrow, and Julia could then attend to Ethel; but Mary was quite sure it would not do to wait an hour or a minute; the case must be attended to now. “It is my duty, and I will not shrink from it. I’ll try to act exactly as mamma always does,—not harsh, but sad and gentle,—Ethel, my child, come here.”
“Don’t want to,” said Ethel, approaching slowly and sullenly, drawing her little chair behind her.
“Not that way, dear; mamma never allows you to go all doubled up, dragging your chair like a snail with his house on his back. There, sit down and tell me about it. What made you so naughty?”
“My head aches. Don’t want to talk.”
“Were you playing dolls?”