Mary Chavah sent her letter of blunt directions concerning her sister's headstone and the few belongings which her sister had wished her to have. The last lines of the letter were about the boy.
"Send the little one along. I am not the one, but I don't know what else to tell you to do with him. Let me know when to expect him, and put his name in with his things—I can't remember his right name."
When the answer came from John Blood, a fortnight later, it said that a young fellow of those parts was starting back home shortly to spend Christmas, and would take charge of the child as far as the City, and there put him on his train for Old Trail Town. She would be notified just what day to expect him, and John knew how glad his mother would have been and his father too, and he was her grateful Nephew. P. S. He would send some money every month "toward him."
The night after she received this letter, Mary lay long awake, facing what it was going to mean to have him there: to have a child there.
She recalled what she had heard other women say about it,—stray utterances, made with the burdened look that hid a secret complacency, a kind of pleased freemasonry in a universal lot.
"The children bring so much sand into the house. You'd think it was horses."
"... the center table looks loaded and ready to start half the time ... but I can't help it, with the children's books and truck."
"... never would have another house built without a coat closet. The children's cloaks and caps and rubbers litter up everything."
"... every one of their knees out, and their underclothes outgrown, and their waists soiled, the whole time. And I do try so hard...."
Now with all these bewilderments she was to have to do. She wondered if she would know how to dress him. Once she had watched Mis' Winslow dress a child, and she remembered what unexpected places Mis' Winslow had buttoned—buttonholes that went up and down in the skirt bands, and so on. Armholes might be too small and garters too tight, and how was one ever to know? If it were a little girl now ... but a little boy.... What would she talk to him about while they ate together?