“I’m makin’ my expairaments.”
But her thoughtfulness increased. “It seems
to me,” she said slowly:—“Herbert,
it seems to me there must be some awful inter’sting
thing we could do with so many bugs all together like
this.”
“’We’!” he cried. “My
goodness, whose insecks do you think these insecks
are?”
“I just know there’s somep’n,”
she went on, following her own line of thought, and
indifferent to his outburst. “There’s
somep’n we could do with ’em that we’d
never forget, if we could only think of it.”
In spite of himself, Herbert was interested.
“Well, what?” he asked. “What
could we do with ’em we’d never forget?”
In her eyes there was a far-away light as of a seeress
groping. “I don’t just know exackly,
but I know there’s somep’n—if
we could only think of it—if we could just——”
And her voice became inaudible, as in dreamy concentration
she seated herself upon the discarded ice-cream freezer,
and rested her elbows upon her knees and her chin upon
the palms of her hands.
In silence then, she thought and thought. Herbert
also was silent, for he, too, was trying to think,
not knowing that already he had proved himself to
be wax in her hands, and that he was destined further
to show himself thus malleable. Like many and
many another of his sex, he never for an instant suspected
that he spent the greater part of his time carrying
out ideas implanted within him by a lady-friend.
Florence was ever the imaginative one of those two,
a maiden of unexpected fancies and inexplicable conceptions,
a mind of quicksilver and mist. There was within
her the seedling of a creative artist, and as she sat
there, on the ice-cream freezer in Herbert’s
cellar, with the slowly growing roseate glow of deep
preoccupation upon her, she looked strangely sweet
and good, and even almost pretty.
“Do you s’pose,” she said, at last,
in a musing voice: “Herbert, do you s’pose
maybe there’s some poor family’s children
somewheres that haven’t got any playthings or
anything and we could take all these——”
But here Herbert proved unsympathetic. “I’m
not goin’ to give my insecks to any poor people’s
children,” he said emphatically. “I
don’t care how poor they are!”
“Well, I thought maybe just as a surprise——”
“I won’t do it. I had mighty hard
work to catch this c’lection, and I’m
not goin’ to give it away to anybody, I don’t
care how surprised they’d be! Anyway, I’d
never get any thanks for it; they wouldn’t know
how to handle ’em, and they’d get all
stung up: and what’d be the use, anyhow?
I don’t see how that’s goin’
to be somep’n so interesting we’d never
forget it.”
“No,” she said. “I guess it
wouldn’t. I just thought it would be kind
of a bellnevolent thing to do.”
This word disturbed Herbert, but he did not feel altogether
secure in his own impression that “benovvalent”
was the proper rendition of what she meant, and so
refrained from criticism. Their musing was resumed.
