The Next-Door-Neighbor’s face was flaming. “If you say that again, I’ll scream. It sounds silly to me.”
“But it isn’t in the least silly,” said the Small Girl’s mother, and her eyes were as blue as sapphires, and as clear as the sea; “it is sensible. When people are poor, they have to make the most of little things. And we’ll have only a pound of steak in our pie, but the onions will be silver——”
The lips of the Next-Door-Neighbor were folded in a thin line. “If you had acted like a sensible creature, I shouldn’t have asked you for the rent.”
The Small Girl’s mother was silent for a moment, then she said: “I am sorry—it ought to be sensible to make the best of things.”
“Well,” said the Next-Door-Neighbor, sitting down in a chair with a very stiff back, “a beefsteak pie is a beefsteak pie. And I wouldn’t teach a child to call it anything else.”
“I haven’t taught her to call it anything else. I was only trying to make her feel that it was something fine and splendid for Christmas day, so I said that the onions were silver——”
“Don’t say that again,” snapped the Next-Door-Neighbor, “and I want the rent as soon as possible.”
With that, she flung up her head and marched out of the front door, and it slammed behind her and made wild echoes in the little house.
And the Small Girl’s mother stood there alone in the middle of the floor, and her eyes were like the sea in a storm.
But presently the door opened, and the Small Girl, looking like a red-breast robin, hopped in, and after her came a great black cat with his tail in the air, and he said “Purr-up,” which gave him his name.