Quite against all intention, the White Linen Nurse giggled. Floundering to recover her dignity, she plunged into a new error. “Poor little dev—” she began.
“Yes,” sighed the Little Girl, complacently, “that’s just what the parpa calls me.” Fervidly she clasped her little hands together. “Yes, if I can only make him mad enough daytimes,” she asserted, “then at night, when he thinks I’m asleep, he comes and stands by my cribbyhouse like a great black shadow-bear, and shakes and shakes his most beautiful head and says, ‘Poor little devil! poor little devil!’ Oh, if I can only make him mad enough daytimes!” she cried out ecstatically.
“Why, you naughty little thing!” scolded the White Linen Nurse, with an unmistakable catch in her voice. “Why, you naughty, naughty little thing!”
Like the brush of a butterfly’s wing, the child’s hand grazed the White Linen Nurse’s cheek.
“I’m a lonely little thing,” she confided wistfully. “Oh, I’m an awfully lonely little thing!” With really shocking abruptness the old malicious smile came twittering back to her mouth. “But I’ll get even with the parpa yet,” she threatened joyously, reaching out with pliant fingers to count the buttons on the White Linen Nurse’s dress. “Oh, I’ll get even with the parpa yet!” In the midst of the passionate assertion her rigid little mouth relaxed in a most mild and innocent yawn.
“Oh, of course,” she yawned, “on wash-days and ironing-days and every other workday in the week he has to be away cutting up people, ’cause that’s his lawful business; but Sundays, when he doesn’t really need to at all, he goes off to some kind of a green, grassy club all day long and plays golf.” Very palpably her eyelids began to droop. “Where was I?” she asked sharply. “Oh, yes, ‘the green, grassy club.’ Well, when I die,” she faltered, “I’m going to die specially on some Sunday when there’s a big golf game, so he’ll just naturally have to give it up and stay home and amuse me—and help arrange the flowers. The parpa’s crazy about flowers. So am I,” she added broodingly. “I raised almost a geranium once. But the parpa threw it out. It was a good geranium, too. All it did was just to drip the tiniest-teeniest bit over a book and a writing and somebody’s brains in a dish. He threw it at a cat. It was a good cat, too. All it did was to—”
A little jerkily her drooping head bobbed forward and then back again. Her heavy eyes were almost tight shut by this time, and after a moment’s silence her lips began moving dumbly like one at silent devotions. “I’m making a little poem now,” she confided at last. “It’s about—you and me. It’s a sort of a little prayer.” Very, very softly she began to repeat:
“Now I sit me down to nap,
All curled up in a nursie’s lap.
If she should die before I wake—”