“Yes, you ought. Mrs. Amy does what she likes without consulting the Colonel,” Mrs. Biggs rejoined. “It would not do to send them back and upset her, and isn’t there a verse somewhere in the Bible about taking what the gods give ye?”
Eloise knew what she meant, and replied, “’Take the good the gods provide,’ and they are certainly providing for me bountifully, but I must at least write a note of thanks to Mrs. Amy for her thoughtfulness and kindness.”
To this Mrs. Biggs, who felt that she was in league with the young men, also objected.
“Better not,” she said. “Better wait till you can go and thank her in person. I’ll have Tim wheel you up some day. He’d like nothing better.”
To this Eloise finally assented, and at once exchanged the hair-cloth rocker for the sea chair, which she found a great improvement. When Tim came from school he was told of the addition to the furniture in the parlor by his mother, who added, “I smelt a rat at once, and thought it a pity to spoil the young men’s fun. Mrs. Amy don’t know nothin’ about them chairs, no more than the man in the moon, and if Miss Smith had much worldly sense she’d know they never came from Mrs. Amy. But she hain’t. She’s nothin’ but a child, and don’t dream that both them young men is jest bewitched over her. I don’t b’lieve Mr. Howard means earnest, but t’other one does. He’s got the best face. I’d trust myself with him anywhere.”
Tim laughed at the idea that his mother could not trust herself with anybody, but said nothing. He was Eloise’s devoted slave, and offered to wheel her miles if she cared to go; but she was satisfied with a few turns up and down the road, which gave her fresh air and showed her something of the country. The wheel chair was a great success, as well as the sea chair, in which she was sitting when the young men came in the afternoon to call, bringing some books which Mrs. Amy thought would interest her, and a box of candy, which Jack presented in his own person. He could not face her with Mrs. Amy as Howard could, and he felt himself a great impostor as he received her thanks for Mrs. Amy, who, he was sure, had entirely forgotten the girl.
No mention was ever made of her in Amy’s presence or the Colonel’s. He was not yet over his wrath at the accident to his carriage and horse, which, with strange perversity, he charged to the Normal. Brutus was getting well, but there would always be a scar on his shoulder, where the sharp-pointed shrub had entered the flesh. The carriage had been repaired, the stained cushions had been re-covered, and the Colonel had sworn at the amount of the bill, and said it never would have happened if the trustees had hired Ruby Ann in the first place, as they should have done. He knew she now had the school, and felt a kind of grim satisfaction that it was so. She was rooted and grounded, while the other one, as far as he could learn, was a little pink and white doll, with no fundamentals whatever. He had forgotten that Howard was to sound her, and did not dream how often that young man and his friend were at Mrs. Biggs’s, not sounding Eloise as to her knowledge, but growing more and more intoxicated with her beauty and sweetness and entire absence of the self-consciousness and airs they were accustomed to find in most young ladies.