“What are you talking about?” demanded
Margaret, turning from her mirror. “Uncle
John sent them here. Why shouldn’t he let
them stay?”
Penrod looked crestfallen. “Then he hasn’t
taken to drink?”
“Certainly not!” She emphasized the denial
with a pretty peal of soprano laughter.
“Then why,” asked her brother gloomily,
“why did Aunt Clara look so worried when she
got here?”
“Good gracious! Don’t people worry
about anything except somebody’s drinking?
Where did you get such an idea?”
“Well,” he persisted, “you don’t
know it ain’t that.”
She laughed again, wholeheartedly. “Poor
Uncle John! He won’t even allow grape juice
or ginger ale in his house. They came because
they were afraid little Clara might catch the measles.
She’s very delicate, and there’s such
an epidemic of measles among the children over in Dayton
the schools had to be closed. Uncle John got so
worried that last night he dreamed about it; and this
morning he couldn’t stand it any longer and
packed them off over here, though he thinks its wicked
to travel on Sunday. And Aunt Clara was worried
when she got here because they’d forgotten to
check her trunk and it will have to be sent by express.
Now what in the name of the common sense put it into
your head that Uncle John had taken to——”
“Oh, nothing.” He turned lifelessly
away and went downstairs, a new-born hope dying in
his bosom. Life seems so needlessly dull sometimes.
Next morning, when he had once more resumed the dreadful
burden of education, it seemed infinitely duller.
And yet what pleasanter sight is there than a schoolroom
well filled with children of those sprouting years
just before the ’teens? The casual visitor,
gazing from the teacher’s platform upon these
busy little heads, needs only a blunted memory to
experience the most agreeable and exhilarating sensations.
Still, for the greater part, the children are unconscious
of the happiness of their condition; for nothing is
more pathetically true than that we “never know
when we are well off.” The boys in a public
school are less aware of their happy state than are
the girls; and of all the boys in his room, probably
Penrod himself had the least appreciation of his felicity.
He sat staring at an open page of a textbook, but
not studying; not even reading; not even thinking.
Nor was he lost in a reverie: his mind’s
eye was shut, as his physical eye might well have
been, for the optic nerve, flaccid with ennui, conveyed
nothing whatever of the printed page upon which the
orb of vision was partially focused. Penrod was
doing something very unusual and rare, something almost
never accomplished except by coloured people or by
a boy in school on a spring day: he was doing
really nothing at all. He was merely a state of
being.
