Fanny J—— once laid a wager with me that she would make him bow. She contrived a plan to meet him as he returned from the Square. I hid behind the stone wall, and peeped through the chinks. Just as they met, she almost let the wind blow her bonnet off, hoping to catch his eye. But he looked so straight forward into the distance that I was alarmed, thinking there might be a loose horse coming, or a house afire. That was in the first of my staying there. We were afterwards great friends. He liked me, because I was good to the old folks, and to Emily,—and had a sort of respect for me, because I was the oldest, and because I could talk, and because of the great thick books in my room. I respected him, because I had seen the world and its shams, and knew him to be good all the way through, and because he couldn't talk, and also, perhaps, because he was so much bigger and handsomer than I. In fact, I should have felt quite downhearted about my own looks, if I hadn't learned from books—not the thick ones—that sallow-looking men, with dark eyes, are interesting.
David's mother approved of steady habits, but for all that she would rather have had him waste some of his time, and be like the rest of his kind.
"Poor David!" she would say, sometimes, "if anybody could only make him think he was somebody, he'd be somebody. But he 'a'n't got no confidence."
"Mother," I would answer, "don't worry about David. He's good, and goodness is as good as anything."
She liked to have me call her mother. I had been there so long that I almost filled the place of one of her lost ones. Besides, I had no mother of my own, and no real home.
Miss Joey, not being past thirty, had a plan in her head. Her head was small,—so was she,—but the plan was large enough and good enough.
This plan, however, was upset, and by her own means, even before the prospect of its being carried out was even probable. It was Miss Joey's own notion that one half the house should be let.
"We are so dwindled down," she said. "A small, quiet family would bring in a little something, and be company." This was at the close of a long and rather lonely winter.
So, one day, Mr. Lane came home, and said he had let the other half to a family from up-country,—man and wife and little girl.
"The very thing!" said Miss Joey.