“Mother already has a feather bed,” Arthur reminded her.
“They won’t let you take an automobile into the coach,” Edward warned her.
“It’s a rug for the parlor,” Grace told them. “You know it is a parlor—one of the few left in the Mississippi valley. And mother has had that ingrain down since before we left home——”
Grace’s eyes were misted. Why would women always do that? This was no occasion for sentiment. This was a merry Christmas.
“Very nice. And Ricky’d better look sharp,” said Edward dryly.
Ricky never did look sharp. About trains he was conspicuously ignorant. He had no occupation. Some said that he “wrote,” but no one had ever seen anything that he had written. He lived in town—no one knew how—never accepted a cent from his brothers and was beloved of every one, most of all of his mother.
“Ricky won’t bring anything, of course,” they said.
But when the train had pulled out without him, observably, a porter came staggering through the cars carrying two great suitcases and following a perturbed man of forty-something who said, “Oh, here you are!” as if it were they who were missing, and squeezed himself and his suitcases among brothers and sister and rug. “I had only a minute to spare,” he said regretfully. “If I’d had two, I could have snatched some flowers. I flung ’em my card and told ’em to send ’em.”
“Why are you taking so many lugs?” they wanted to know.
Ricky focused on the suitcases. “Just necessities,” he said. “Just the presents. I didn’t have room to get in anything else.”