There was a family living in the rear of the Aronsons, with a divine little 8-year-old girl. Saul knew she was divine, although he had never seen anything but the back of her head. For at noontime when he came to dinner, or in the evening when he returned from work, she would be sitting in the swing her father had built for her, with her back toward him—swinging, singing, in blissful ignorance of the eyes that doted on her through the slats of Saul Aronson's blinds. She had one song of "the Savior" which she delighted to croon. Her voice was like that of a fledgling lark and her carols were made sweet with little improvised turns which often threatened to fail but always came out true—so sure was the child-singer's instinct, feeling the way before her. Nothing reminded him of Serena so much as this earthly angel, and he loved her for the image she called up.
Serena always looked at him. That is to say, her blue eyes pierced him through, accused him, reproved him, every time they were lifted toward the onlookers. But it was not until the day he raised his hand among the converts that she noted down his face for remembrance. He knew its features were not fascinating, especially the red mustache that bristled out horizontally from his lips, with the ends trimmed off as clean as a scrubbing-brush. But no one else, he felt sure, could worship her with such reverent adoration; and now she had deigned to notice him. What if Simon Rabofsky scowled at his raising his hand? Not "What will Simon Rabofsky say?" but "What will Peter say, Aronson?" was the question of questions. But I fear Peter was confused somewhat oddly in Saul's mind with the possessor of a certain rosebud mouth.
One night Aronson dreamed of Serena Lamb as his bride and the next morning announced his conversion to Pineapple Jupiter, at the same time asking for an introduction to blue eyes.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
A RECANTATION.
Saul Aronson was not the only person who found pleasure in the company of Miss Lamb. There were others, with eyes not glamoured by any golden mist of love, who would have found it hard to select an adjective strong enough to express their approbation of the petite devotee. About a year before she had come down from the country to be a companion to her aunt, Mrs. Wolfe, who had just lost her husband.
Mrs. Wolfe (according to neighbors' gossip) had been no more than a moderately loving wife, but she made a devoted widow. She had the waist of a wasp and a temper to match it. Her frame was angular, and her disposition, too, revealed shoulder blades and elbows. If she loved anything in this world it was her marbled cat, which was hated by every boarder in the house, and a pariah among its tribe. From constant visiting of her husband's grave her manners had assumed a cast which would have been appropriate to a cemetery, but was most depressing in everyday converse. Even her smile had something acrid about it, like a shopworn lemon, and the acidity of her scowl would have reddened blue litmus paper.
People wondered why her niece, such a tender little body, should be doomed to the martyrdom of waiting upon "Old Tabby Wolfe and her boarders." Mrs. Gubbins, who was the landlady's most intimate crony—probably because among her other virtues she had a keen sense of the doleful—spread the report that Serena would inherit her aunt's property, and that her own mother, Mrs. Wolfe's sister, had had an eye to this when she parted with the eldest of her household. However that might be, the girl put up patiently with all the widow's quirks and oddities; entered into religious work enthusiastically, and in six months had rubbed off the slight rusticity with which eighteen years of choring on a farm, before she came down to the city, had touched her accent and manner.
There were hardly any traces of kinship between aunt and niece. To be sure, Serena had the slenderest slip of a waist that nature ever fashioned, and just the least suggestion of cheek bones, too, which were not at all disagreeable, however. When occasion demanded, she could give a sharp order, much as she may have rebuked Spot and Bossy for switching when she milked them in the cowshed at home. But to the boarders these bursts of impatience only gave their sweet waitress a piquancy like the tartness of the full-ripe strawberry.