“Well, then you can make it longer. You can call me Aunt Annie. I think that will be better for a little girl; don't you?”
“Mothers can whip, but aunts can't,” said Idella, bringing a practical knowledge, acquired from her observation of life Over the Track, to a consideration of the proposed relation.
“I know one aunt who won't,” said Annie, touched by the reply.
Saturday evening Idella's father came for her; and with a preamble which seemed to have been unnecessary when he understood it, Annie asked him to let her keep the child, at least till he had settled himself in a house of his own, or, she hinted, in some way more comfortable for Idella than he was now living. In her anxiety to make him believe that she was not taking too great a burden on her hands, she became slowly aware that no fear of this had apparently troubled him, and that he was looking at the whole matter from a point outside of questions of polite ceremonial, even of personal feeling.
She was vexed a little with his insensibility to the favour she meant the child, and she could not help trying to make him realise it. “I don't promise always to be the best guide, philosopher, and friend that Idella could have”—she took this light tone because she found herself afraid of him—“but I think I shall be a little improvement on some of her friends Over the Track. At least, if she wants my cat, she shall have it without fighting for it.”
Mr. Peck looked up with question, and she went on to tell him of a struggle which she had seen one day between Idella and a small Irish boy for a kitten; it really belonged to the boy, but Idella carried it off.
The minister listened attentively. At the end: “Yes,” he said, “that lust of possession is something all but impossible, even with constant care, to root out of children. I have tried to teach Idella that nothing is rightfully hers except while she can use it; but it is hard to make her understand, and when she is with other children she forgets.”
Annie could not believe at first that he was serious, and then she was disposed to laugh. “Really, Mr. Peck,” she began, “I can't think it's so important that a little thing like Idella should be kept from coveting a kitten as that she should be kept from using naughty words and from scratching and biting.”
“I know,” Mr. Peck consented. “That is the usual way of looking at such things.”
“It seems to me,” said Annie, “that it's the common-sense way.”