Sally hastily untied him, comforting him, meanwhile, as well as she could. But Charlie, noticing something unusual in her voice, looked up into her face and saw traces of tears. He immediately burst into tears himself.
"Charlie!" cried Sally, fiercely; "Charlie! Laugh, now! Laugh, I tell you." She glanced over the wall. "Here come Fox Sanderson and Henrietta. Laugh!"
CHAPTER V[ToC]
Sally always remembered that winter, a winter of hard work and growing anxiety for her, enlivened by brief and occasional joys. She got to know Fox and Henrietta very well, which was a continual joy and enlivenment. Sally did not count dancing-school among the enlivenments. And the infrequent lessons with Fox and Henrietta and her father were enlivenments, too, usually; not always. After the times when they were not, Sally wanted to cry, but she didn't, which made it all the harder.
Her mother seemed steadily progressing toward permanent invalidism, while her father was doing much worse than that. And she took more and more of the burden of both upon her own small shoulders. Poor child! She should have known no real anxiety; none more real than the common anxieties of childhood. But perhaps they are real enough. Sally was not eleven yet.
It is hard to say whether her mother or her father caused Sally the more anxiety. Her mother's progress was so gradual that the change from day to day—or from week to week, for that matter—was not noticeable; while her father's was spasmodic. Sally did not see him during a spasm, so that she did not know how noticeable the change was from day to day or from hour to hour. We do not speak of weeks in such cases. But it was just after a spasm that he was apt to make his appearance again at home in a condition of greater or less dilapidation, with nerves on edge and his temper in such a state that Mrs. Ladue had grown accustomed, in those circumstances, to the use of great care when she was forced to address him. Lately, she had avoided him entirely at such times. Sally, on the contrary, made no effort to avoid him and did not use great care when she addressed him, although she was always respectful. This course was good for the shreds of the professor's soul and perhaps no harder for Sally. But that was not the reason why she did it. She could not have done differently.
There was the time in the fall, but that was over. And there was the time at Christmas which Sally nipped in the bud. Following the Christmas fiasco—a fiasco only from the point of view of the professor—was the Era of Good Behavior. That is begun with capitals because Sally was very happy about her father during that era, although her mother's health worried her more and more. Then there was the time late in the winter, after her father had broken down under the strain of Good Behavior for two months; and, again, twice in March. Professor Ladue must have been breaking rapidly during that spring, for there came that awful time when it seemed, even to Sally, as if the bottom were dropping out of everything and as if she had rather die than not. Dying seems easier to all of us when we are rather young, although the idea does not generally come to us when we are ten years old. But it must be remembered that Sally was getting rather more than her fair share of hard knocks. Later in life dying does not seem so desirable. It is a clear shirking of responsibility. Not that Sally ought to have had responsibility.