“Why pity me then?” asked Lester with a grin, drawing his needle in and out of the little stocking.
“Well, but. …” she said breathlessly, and was silent.
There was a pause. Then she asked meekly, climbing down with relief from the abstruse and unfamiliar abstract to the friendly concrete, “However in the world did you learn to darn, Lester?”
“Out of a book,” he told her tranquilly. “While I was still in bed I sent to the Library for any books they had on housekeeping. They sent me some corking ones—as good reading as ever I saw.”
“Why, I didn’t know they had books about housekeeping at the Library!” said Mattie, who was a great reader of novels.
“I bet I know more about cooking than you do, this minute,” he said, laughing at her. “Why do you put your flour for a cream sauce into the butter and cook it before you add the milk?”
“I don’t,” she said, astonished. “I heat my milk and mix my flour with a little cold water and. …”
“Well, you’re wrong,” he said authoritatively. “That’s not the best way. The flour isn’t thoroughly cooked. Fat can be heated many degrees hotter than water.”
Mattie Farnham felt herself sinking deeper and deeper into a stupid bewilderment. Was it really Lester Knapp with whom she sat discussing recipes? She had come over to sympathize and condole with him. However in the living world had she been switched off to cream sauce? She got up, shook herself and took a step or two around the room.
“Don’t go looking to see if the furniture is dusted or the floor polished,” said Lester calmly. “We concentrate on the important things in our house and let the non-essentials go.”
“I wasn’t thinking about dust!” she told him, exasperated (although she had been). And then, struck by a sudden thought, “Where’s Stephen?”
“Out in his sandpile.”
“Why, I thought he ran away if he was left out of anybody’s sight for a minute. I thought you didn’t dare let him be by himself for. …”
“Oh, Stevie’s all right,” said Lester carelessly; “he’s coming along like a house afire.”
He wheeled himself to the door, opened it and rolled his chair out on the porch. A blue-denimed little figure rose up from the other end and showed a tousled head, bright dark eyes and a round dirty face with a calm expression. “I got my tunnel fixed,” he announced.
“Did you?” asked Lester, with interest. “That can business did work?” To Mattie he explained, “Stephen is fixing up a railway system, and the sand kept falling in on his tunnel. We finally thought of taking the bottom out of an old baking-powder can. That leaves it open at both ends.”
“It works dandy,” said Stephen. He now added of his own accord, with a casual look at Mrs. Farnham, “Hello, Aunt Mattie.”
It was the first time Mrs. Farnham could remember that she had ever had a friendly greeting from Stephen. Eva’s conscientious attempts to make him perform the minimum of decent salutations, to come and shake hands and say “How do you do?” usually ended in a storm of raging stamping refusals.
“Hello, Stephen,” she answered, feeling quite touched by his friendly tone. He looked very quiet and good-natured, too. Well, of course, all children do grow out of their naughty ways if you can only live till then. She had always said that Stephen would outgrow his. But she had never believed it. It was a good idea to have a sandpile for him. Children always like them. Of course it brought sand into the house something terrible. Children never would wipe their feet. But now that any attempt at real housekeeping had been given up in poor Eva’s house, a little more or less dirt didn’t matter. She had as a matter of fact (although she had denied it) noticed that the corners of the room were very dusty. And those preposterous papers on the floor! What a ridiculous idea!
No more ridiculous than having the sandpile on the porch! Whoever heard of such a thing!
“I should think you’d find it hard to keep the porch clean,” she said to Lester.
“We don’t,” he said bafflingly.
“Why not have it out in the yard?”
“Some of the playthings would get spoiled by the rain.” He advanced this as conclusive.
Stephen had squatted down again to his sand. She went cautiously towards the wide plank to see what he was doing, prepared to have him snarl out one of his hateful catchwords: “Go ’way! Go ’way!” or the one he had acquired lately, the insolent, “Who’s doing this anyhow?”
But what she saw was so astonishing to her that before she could stop to think, she burst out in an impulsive exclamation of admiration, “Why, Stephen Knapp, did you do all that yourself?”
Beyond the board lay a tiny fairy-world of small, tree-lined, pebble-paved roads, moss-covered hills, small looking-glass lakes, white pasteboard farmhouses with green blinds, surrounded by neat white toothpick fences, broad meadows with red-and-white paper cows and a tiny farm wagon with minute, plumped-out sacks, driving to the railroad.
A large area of her own simple consciousness was still sunny with child-heartedness, and it was with the utmost sincerity of accent that she cried out, “Why, I’d love to play with that myself!”
Stephen looked proudly up at her and lovingly down at his creation. “You can if you want to.” He conceded the privilege with lordly generosity.
She got stiffly down on her middle-aged knees, to be nearer the little world, and clasped her hands in ecstasy over the “sweet little barn” and the “darling locomotive.” Why, she remembered now that she herself had given that toy train to Stephen. The last time she had noticed it was when, unsurprised, she had seen Stephen kicking it
