“Well, it would,” Florence said.
“But anyway, I think we did rather wrong.
Did you notice what Kitty Silver said about what grandpa
did?”
“Well?”
“I think we ought to tell him our share of it,”
Florence returned thoughtfully. “I don’t
want to go to bed to-night with all this on my mind,
and I’m going to find grandpa right now and confess
every bit of it to him.”
Herbert hopefully decided to go with her.
Julia, like Herbert, had been a little puzzled by
Florence’s expression of a partiality for the
young man, Noble Dill; it was not customary for anybody
to confess a weakness for him. However, the aunt
dismissed the subject from her mind, as other matters
pressed sharply upon her attention; she had more worries
than most people guessed.
The responsibilities of a lady who is almost officially
the prettiest person in a town persistently claiming
sixty-five thousand inhabitants are often heavier
than the world suspects, and there were moments when
Julia found the position so trying that she would have
preferred to resign. She was a warm-hearted,
appreciative girl, naturally unable to close her eyes
to sterling merit wherever it appeared: and it
was not without warrant that she complained of her
relatives. The whole family, including the children,
she said, regaled themselves with her private affairs
as a substitute for theatre-going. But one day,
a week after the irretrievable disappearance of Fifi
and Mimi, she went so far as to admit a note of unconscious
confession into her protest that she was getting pretty
tired of being mistaken for a three-ring circus!
Such was her despairing expression, and the confession
lies in her use of the word “three.”
The misleading moderation of “three” was
pointed out to her by her niece, whose mind at once
violently seized upon the word and divested it of
context—a process both feminine and instinctive,
for this child was already beginning to be feminine.
“Three!” she said. “Why, Aunt
Julia, you must be crazy! There’s Newland
Sanders and Noble Dill and that old widower, Ridgley,
that grandpa hates so, and Mister Clairdyce and George
Plum and the two new ones from out of town that Aunt
Fanny Patterson said you had at church Sunday morning—Herbert
said he didn’t like one of ’em’s
looks much, Aunt Julia. And there’s Parker
Kent Usher and that funny-lookin’ one with the
little piece of whiskers under his underlip that Noble
Dill got so mad at when they were calling, and Uncle
Joe laughed about, and I don’t know who all!
Anyhow, there’s an awful lot more than three,
Aunt Julia.”
