At last it had to be faced.
“We just can’t go on. We’ll either have to sell the house and move into a little one, or take boarders.”
“Sell The Maples?”
“Well, then, we’ll have to take boarders.”
So they put an advertisement in the paper, and were sick with terror for fear someone would answer it.
Mr. and Mrs. Hopper and Miss Hopper came first. “Oh, don’t like it! Don’t like it!” Maggie prayed in her heart, as she showed them Mamma’s room and the tiny room opening off it, where Victor had slept when he was a little boy.
“Ho-hum!” yawned old Mrs. Hopper. Her feet were tired, and Josie kept on asking so many questions—weren’t the trains noisy, and could Papa have a glass of hot milk at bedtime, and how about the bathroom? She picked up a pink plush pincushion bursting out of a silver slipper, and turned it over to see if there was a sterling mark on the bottom. “Well, Mr. Hopper, you satisfied?” she asked her husband. They both of them knew it was Josie who had to be satisfied, but they liked to pretend.
And thin old-maid Miss Hopper, with her cheap little rings and bracelets and rhinestone combs, her beaver picture-hat, high on her head, and her bunchy suit covered with big fancy buttons and sandwiches of Irish lace and velvet, went on asking questions, so tired of taking care of these two helpless old babies, so tired of lagging while her slow old mother toiled along, wagging her broad behind from side to side, blocking up passageways and making audible remarks about people. “Miss Hopper is so sweet to her mother,” people said, when at a touch, Miss Hopper could have burst out screaming and shoved Mrs. Hopper along from behind, making her fat old legs trot, could have shrieked “Oh, shut up!” instead of mouthing, “She’ll hear you, Mama. I—don’t—know—who—she—is—”
Mrs. Mittendorf came next, because she was a friend of Mrs. Hopper’s. Just before supper, the two would put small knitted shawls around their shoulders and take little walks around the porch, their broad seats swaying, Mrs. Mittendorf calling “Hay foot! Straw foot!” Mrs. Mittendorf hadn’t been there a week before she spilled a whole bottle of essence of peppermint on the nice new mattress.
Mr. Neff had the old schoolroom. Maggie got it ready for him with a sword turning in her heart. And after him came Miss Snaith, so quickly that Miss Hopper was sure she had followed him.
Victor was hardly ever at home in the evening any more. He couldn’t stand the boarders all over the house.
“I can’t ever get into the bathroom,” he complained to Maggie.
“I know—it’s Miss Snaith. She takes hours in there; I believe she washes out her underclothes on the sly. And then, of course, the others complain about there not being any hot water.”
“Well, I’d like sometimes to be able to get to my room without running into a scuttling female in bedroom slippers and curl papers.”
“They’re getting ready to dazzle you and Mr. Neff, steaming their faces under towels and smoking up the lamps with their old curling irons.”
“That double-distilled ass! Why are they so excited about him? He looks like something left over from a straw-ride—and sticking out his chest as if he owned the house. It doesn’t seem like home any more.”
“It’s hard on you. I wish we didn’t have to.”
“Well, it’s harder on you,” Victor said, and suddenly hit her cheek with his lips, quickly and shyly, and ran upstairs. Her nose tingled, tears came to her eyes. “Old foolish!” she told herself severely with a loud sniff, and hid away the moment with all the other times of especial loving kindness between herself and Victor—moments to wrap in tissue of gold and hide in her heart forever.
“Ain’t it cold?” complained old Mrs. Hopper. “I hope I haven’t caught a cold; these ceilings are so high seems as if the heat all went up to the top, and I believe I had a draught on my back at dinner. I guess maybe I better take some camphor, I don’t want to get a cold—”
The cracked, feeble, old voice droned on.
Mrs. Mittendorf patted an enormous yawn. “Pardon me—I have the gapes!” She billowed in the most comfortable chair, nearest the fire, her pink chins scalloped down to her great curve of bosom, her fat fingers, bulging from her dirty diamond rings, spread themselves tenderly, lovingly on the curve of her stomach. “Keep your stomach warm and you’ll be all right,” she advised. “I’m a great believer in taking care of the stomach—that’s the important thing. Be good to your stomach if you want your stomach to be good to you.”
The Stomach. She sat there like some idol made of great globes of pink crystal and ebony, holding tenderly that thing that was before men were, that insatiable thing that men work all their lives to satisfy. Bring offerings of red meat, silver fish, sheaves of wheat, tear the grapes from the vines; hurry, hurry, or the Stomach will curl its lash of hunger around the bodies of its slaves.
Miss Snaith didn’t think all this talk about tummies was very delicate, with gentlemen in the room. She was sitting on the floor, showing her Teddy bear pictures in the fire, talking through it to Mr. Neff.
“See the pixtures in the fire, Teddy? See the little fire fairies? It just seems as if they were dancing, don’t it? Yes, Teddy sees them! Teddy says they look like they had blue and yellow skirts all going fluttery.”
“A very pretty little fancy,” said Mr. Neff kindly, rousing Mrs. Hopper to call to her daughter:
“Ain’t you going to give
