We told her what had happened, some of his telling and some of mine. It came over me, while we were doing it, that what had sounded so sensible and sure in the train and in the automobile and in our two hearts sounded different here in the Proudfits' big, brown library, with Madame Proudfit in black lace and jewels I didn't know the name of, listening. But then I looked up in the Brother-man's face and I got right back, like he was a kind of perpetual telegraph, the feeling of its being sensible and the only sensible thing to do. Sensible in the sense of your soul being sensible, and not just your being sensible like your neighbors.
"But, my dear, dear children," Madame Proudfit says, and stopped. "My dear children," she says on, "what, exactly, are you going to do with him?"
"Keep him!" says the Brother-man prompt, and beamed on her as if he had said the one possible answer.
"But—keep him!" says Madame Proudfit. "How 'keep him'? Be practical. What are you going to do?"
It makes you feel real helpless when folks in black lace tell you to be practical, as if that came before everything else—especially when their "practical" and your "practical" might as well be in two different languages. And yet Madame Proudfit is kind and good too, and she understands that you've got to help or you might as well not be alive; and she gives and gives and gives. But this—well, she saw the need and all that, but her way that night would have been to give money and send the little chap away. You know how some are. They can understand everything good and kind—up to a certain point. And that point is, keep him. They can't seem to get past that.
"Keep him!" she says. "Make your bachelor apartment into a nursery? Or you, Calliope, leave him to mind the house while you are canvassing? Be practical. What, exactly, are you going to do?"
Then the Brother-man frowned a little—I hadn't known he could, but I was glad he knew how.
"Really," he said, "I haven't decided yet on the cut of his knickerbockers, or on what college he shall attend, or whether he shall spend his vacations at home or abroad. The details will get themselves done. I only know I mean to keep him."
She shook her head as if she was talking to a foreign language; then we heard somebody coming—a little rustle and swish and afterwards a voice. These three things by themselves would have made somebody more attractive than some women know how to be. I'll never forget how she seemed when she came to the door—Miss Clementina, waiting to speak with her mother and not knowing anybody else was with her.
Honest, I couldn't tell what her dress was—and me a woman that has turned her hand to dressmaking. It was all thin, like light, and it had all little ways of hanging that made you know you never could make one like it, so's you might as well enjoy yourself looking and not fuss with trying to remember how it was put together. But her dress wasn't so much like light as her face. Miss Clementina's face—oh, it was like the face of a beautiful woman that somebody tells you about, and that you never do get to see, and if you did, like enough she might not be so beautiful after all—but you always think of her as being the way you mean when you say "beautiful." Miss Clementina looked like that. And when I saw her that night I could hardly wait to have her face and eyes soften all to Summer, that wonderful way she had.