It was Peter who got at the heart of the trouble. Margaret tried, but though Eleanor clung to her and relaxed under the balm of her gentle caresses, the child remained entirely inarticulate until Peter gathered her up in his arms, and signed to the others that he wished to be left alone with her.

By the time he rejoined the two in the drawing-room—he had missed his after-dinner coffee in the long half-hour that he had spent shut into the guest room with the child—Jimmie and Gertrude had arrived, and the four sat grouped together to await his pronouncement.

“She thinks she has adenoids. She wants the doll that David left in that carpetbag of hers he forgot to take out of the ‘Handsome cab.’ She wants to be loved, and she wants to grow up and write poetry for the newspapers,” he announced. “Also she will eat a piece of bread and butter and a glass of milk, as soon as it can conveniently be provided for her.” 41

“When did you take holy orders, Gram?” Jimmie inquired. “How do you work the confessional? I wish I could make anybody give anything up to me, but I can’t. Did you just go into that darkened chamber and say to the kid, ‘Child of my adoption,—cough,’ and she coughed, or are you the master of some subtler system of choking the truth out of ’em?”

“Anybody would tell anything to Peter if he happened to want to know it,” Margaret said seriously. “Wouldn’t they, Beulah?”

Beulah nodded. “She wants to be loved,” Peter had said. It was so simple for some people to open their hearts and give out love,—easily, lightly. She was not made like that,—loving came hard with her, but when once she had given herself, it was done. Peter didn’t know how hard she had tried to do right with the child that day.

“The doll is called the rabbit doll, though there is no reason why it should be, as it only looks the least tiny bit like a rabbit, and is a girl. Its other name is Gwendolyn, and it always goes to bed with her. Mrs. O’Farrels aunt said that children always stopped playing with dolls when they got to be as big as Eleanor, but she isn’t never 42 going to stop.—You must get after that double negative, Beulah.—She once wrote a poem beginning: ‘The rabbit doll, it is my own.’ She thinks that she has a frog-like expression of face, and that is why Beulah doesn’t like her better. She is perfectly willing to have her adenoids cut out, if Beulah thinks it would improve her, but she doesn’t want to ‘take anything,’ when she has it done.”

“You are a wonder, Gram,” Gertrude said admiringly.

“Oh! I have made a mess of it, haven’t I?” Beulah said. “Is she homesick?”

“Yes, she’s homesick,” Peter said gravely, “but not for anything she’s left in Colhassett. David told you the story, didn’t he?—She is homesick for her own kind, for people she can really love, and she’s never found any of them. Her grandfather and grandmother are old and decrepit. She feels a terrible responsibility for them, but she doesn’t love them, not really. She’s too hungry to love anybody until she finds the friends she can cling to—without compromise.”

“An emotional aristocrat,” Gertrude murmured. “It’s the curse of taste.”

“Help! Help!” Jimmie cried, grimacing at Gertrude. 43 “Didn’t she have any kids her own age to play with?”

“She had ’em, but she didn’t have any time to play with them. You forget she was supporting a family all the time, Jimmie.”

“By jove, I’d like to forget it.”

“She had one friend named Albertina Weston that she used to run around with in school. Albertina also wrote poetry. They used to do poetic ‘stunts’ of one poem a day on some subject selected by Albertina. I think Albertina was a snob. She candidly admitted to Eleanor that if her clothes were more stylish, she would go round with her more. Eleanor seemed to think that was perfectly natural.”

“How do you do it, Peter?” Jimmie besought. “If I could get one damsel, no matter how tender her years, to confide in me like that I’d be happy for life. It’s nothing to you with those eyes, and that matinÉe forehead of yours; but I want ’em to weep down my neck, and I can’t make ’em do it.”

“Wait till you grow up, Jimmie, and then see what happens,” Gertrude soothed him.

“Wait till it’s your turn with our child,” Margaret 44 said. “In two months more she’s coming to you.”

“Do I ever forget it for a minute?” Jimmie cried.

“The point of the whole business is,” Peter continued, “that we’ve got a human soul on our hands. We imported a kind of scientific plaything to exercise our spiritual muscle on, and we’ve got a real specimen of womanhood in embryo. I don’t know whether the situation appalls you as much as it does me—” He broke off as he heard the bell ring.

“That’s David, he said he was coming.”

Then as David appeared laden with the lost carpetbag and a huge box of chocolates, he waved him to a chair, and took up his speech again. “I don’t know whether the situation appalls you, as much as it does me—if I don’t get this off my chest now, David, I can’t do it at all—but the thought of that poor little waif in there and the struggle she’s had, and the shy valiant spirit of her,—the sand that she’s got, the sand that put her through and kept her mouth shut through experiences that might easily have killed her, why I feel as if I’d give anything I had in the world to make 45 it up to her, and yet I’m not altogether sure that I could—that we could—that it’s any of our business to try it.”

“There’s nobody else who will, if we don’t,” David said.

“That’s it,” Peter said, “I’ve never known any one of our bunch to quit anything that they once started in on, but just by way of formality there is one thing we ought to do about this proposition before we slide into it any further, and that is to agree that we want to go on with it, that we know what we’re in for, and that we’re game.”

“We decided all that before we sent for the kid,” Jimmie said, “didn’t we?”

“We decided we’d adopt a child, but we didn’t decide we’d adopt this one. Taking the responsibility of this one is the question before the house just at present.”

“The idea being,” David added, “that she’s a fairly delicate piece of work, and as time advances she’s going to be delicater.”

“And that it’s an awkward matter to play with souls,” Beulah contributed; whereupon Jimmie murmured, “Browning,” sotto voice.

“She may be all that you say, Gram,” Jimmie 46 said, after a few minutes of silence, “a thunderingly refined and high-minded young waif, but you will admit that without an interpreter of the same class, she hasn’t been much good to us so far.”

“Good lord, she isn’t refined and high-minded,” Peter said. “That’s not the idea. She’s simply supremely sensitive and full of the most pathetic possibilities. If we’re going to undertake her we ought to realize fully what we’re up against, and acknowledge it,—that’s all I’m trying to say, and I apologize for assuming that it’s more my business than anybody’s to say it.”

“That charming humility stuff, if I could only remember to pull it.”

The sofa pillow that Gertrude aimed at Jimmie hit him full on the mouth and he busied himself pretending to eat it. Beulah scorned the interruption.

“Of course, we’re going to undertake her,” Beulah said. “We are signed up and it’s all down in writing. If anybody has any objections, they can state them now.” She looked about her dramatically. On every young face was reflected the same earnestness that set gravely on her own.

“The ‘ayes’ have it,” Jimmie murmured. “From 47 now on I become not only a parent, but a soul doctor.” He rose, and tiptoed solemnly toward the door of Eleanor’s room.

“Where are you going, Jimmie?” Beulah called, as he was disappearing around the bend in the corridor.

He turned back to lift an admonitory finger.

“Shush,” he said, “do not interrupt me. I am going to wrap baby up in a blanket and bring her out to her mothers and fathers.”