“Don’t talk to me about girls!” cried Mamma, meaning do.
“And so Willie—O‑oh!”
Priscilla’s hands flew to her mouth, her mild kind eyes swam with tears, and the small nose that looked like a button in the middle of a puffy cushion flushed pink. On the floor lay the glass swan her sleeve had brushed from the table; and Mamma looking at it, felt her eyes fill with tears too. She had never thought about it much before, but, now that it was broken, it seemed to her that it had always been her favorite ornament. Poor little swan! It lay there with its fragile neck snapped right in two, with the violets old Toot had brought in from the cold-frame scattered around it, and a dark patch beside it on the crimson carpet that looked as if it had been bleeding. Yet with those pale bewildered eyes looking at her so beseechingly, she could only repeat to herself the family saying:
“Poor Priscilla means so well!”
She was dreadfully tired by the time Aunt Priscilla went home! But the parlor was decked satisfactorily for Papa’s return. She loved her parlor, almost as much as her conservatory. Each fat chair was a friend, the sofa was a lover who said to her, “Come, lie in my arms.” To walk on the carpet was to walk on crimson roses. Between looped-back crimson window-curtains hung cages of canaries and lovebirds that she had tamed with the endless patience of indolence combined with a sweet nature, and taught to perch on her shoulder and peck at lumps of sugar held between her lips. Under the cages green iron plantstands held geraniums soft as butterfly wings, their velvet leaves banded with chocolate color, growing in pots covered with putty into which she had pressed acorns and little pine-cones. She had crocheted the blue and green and scarlet worsted covers for the goose-egg baskets in the windows, each holding a little bunch of flowers or a feather of fern; she had made the wax pond lilies floating on their mirror pools under glass shades. And even a picture hanging on the wall was hers—a castle on a lake, with mountains and clouds for background. The sky and water were painted; and the mountains were of gray sand; the rocks, of red sand; and a road of yellow sand, sprinkled on glue. The castle was made of white birch-bark, with its dark reddish lining used for the parts in shadow, and the windows and doors painted in with ivory black; and, springing from the moss of the foreground, were trees—bits of untwisted rope with the strands divided at the top to make the limbs. Cousin Lizzie and Aunt Priscilla had made sand-pictures, too. The directions said you could have white clouds, storm clouds, or sunset clouds, but pointed out that sunset clouds were more difficult and required more patience to paint. Mamma had been contented with white clouds, but Cousin Lizzie had done a sunset. As for poor Priscilla’s, hers had ended in nothing much but glue all over everything in the house.
And now to rest!
But almost before she had settled herself on the sofa before the fire, Cousin Lizzie Blow came rustling in, wearing a new black bonnet with scarlet verbenas under the brim. Her black eyes, darting about the room, made Mamma see a curtain looped unevenly, a dead geranium leaf, and the dark patch on the carpet where the glass swan had fallen.
“I came to drive Mr. B. home—he rode over the mare he sold Victor last week. He’s out in the stable-yard with old Toot; and Maggie’s there too, superintending affairs, trying to stand like Mr. B. and Toot, with her legs apart and her hands behind her back. I verily believe she’s such a tomboy because Victor was so frantic for a son. I do hope that he’s—that you’re not going to be disappointed again!”
Mamma’s peach-like cheeks flushed a deeper pink, and her blue eyes looked as if they were going to fill with tears. Goodness knew she had done her best to give Victor a son! In the eleven years of their marriage she had had seven babies, and was expecting another. Victoria (named for Papa and the Queen of England, but mostly for Papa) Anna Louisa, Sophia, and Adelaide had breathed and died, and Mamma often thought of them with tears. But then she had tears for so many things that Papa never knew whether her eyes were red because she had been thinking of the lost babies, or because the sponge-cake had gone flat, or because she had been reading “Miss Proctor’s lovely, darling book of poems.”
What more could she do to give Victor a son than have babies and pray? Even the little girls were helping, having been taught to remind God, at the end of all their prayers, that they would like a brother. Yet Cousin Lizzie lifted her eyebrows and said, “Poor Victor!”
However, everyone knew that Lizzie Campion had been madly in love with her cousin, and had only married Sam Blow to show she didn’t care when Victor married Margaret Southmayd. So Mamma, remembering, thought, “Poor Lizzie!” complacently, and felt better.
“I saw Priscilla scuttling along looking like an old peddler woman. How can she go about so? Willie gives her fifty times the spending money Mr. B. gives me—almost as much as Victor gives you—and what’s more, she spends it, and buys elegant clothes, and yet look at her!”
“Poor Priscilla,” Mamma murmured automatically.
“Poor Priscilla fiddle-dee-dee! Poor Willie, I say. You wouldn’t believe how pretty she was when he married her. She said she’d
