it with the boy. Um, yes. I shouldn’t be surprised if he thinks of it more than you imagine. He’s sullen, that boy.”
Pen’s other brother, Daniel Thatcher, was peering nearsightedly across the room at his young wife. Tessa was a butterfly. She flitted about the room chattering to anybody and everybody about anything or nothing; though, once she came lightly to rest beside her husband, putting her hand on his sleeve and smiling up at him confidentially without saying anything. He was still a little afraid of her, wondering what a sober old stick such as he should say to a young girl who happened to be his wife; and he watched her coming into her careless youth not without a pang.
Daniel was not the only one who watched Tessa Thatcher. Like Maud, she was really a Burnet, the children’s second cousin. Two months before on her eighteenth birthday, she had been married to Daniel (“a birthday present that won’t wear out, my dear Tessa,” said the irrepressible Charles), and she epitomized in her small self Burnet fire and Burnet recklessness. Secretly, the Burnets wondered how the marriage would turn out. “Such a charming, high-spirited girl,” said Fanny to Maud. “It would be a pity if — Do you think it will do, Maud? Daniel’s a splendid man. Tessa needs ballast.”
“Perhaps. But a Burnet and a New England puritan?”
“I married one.”
“Yes, but you two are of an age. And besides, you have poise.… Well, we’ll see.” Fanny, who was forty and unmarried, was sceptical of most marriages.
Tessa was pretty and vivacious, therefore Charles came to talk to her. He liked to pronounce her name; it made him think of a peal of bells or of curls flung upward from a nymph’s forehead.
Eyes dancing, Tessa seized his arm and swung him round to face her. “Good afternoon Uncle Charles. I hear you don’t like me!”
Charles’s age was near enough to hers to make the “uncle” piquant. Joyously, he adjusted his mind to a skirmish. “Now who could have told you that! I only said it in the family.”
“Then it is true? You did say it.… Charles, what did you say, really?”
Charles liked to say outrageous things with a charming smile. “I told your mother,” said he, “that you were a graceful brat; ‘unspanked but graceful’ was the phrase I used. I was annoyed because you were flirting with green youths — with my junior at the bank, if you want to know. It interferes with his bookkeeping and makes a lot of trouble for me.”
“But I didn’t.”
“You have all the stability of a kitten. You can’t help it: champagne bubbles and you flirt.… Like you? You’re my dearest enemy.… Heard anything else about me, Mrs. Thatcher?”
“Yes,” said Tessa spitefully, “I heard you lost a lot of money buying stocks on margin — do they call it?”
“And claws, too,” murmured Charles. “Oh, that ? Unlucky in money — you know the rest of it, Tessa.”
“Are you lucky in love, Charles?”
“It is a family characteristic, Tessa,” said Charles bowing with mock gallantry.
The children, according to their different natures, considered this thing that was presently to be done to them. Dan was rebellious. Alastair, always willing to take a new experience in his stride, felt rather important. But Joanna was so excited that she could not wait another minute for the ceremony to begin. She stood beside her mother, who was talking to Fanny, and tugged at her sleeve.
“In a minute, dear,” said her mother and went on talking. Joanna was an imaginative and believing little girl, and she wondered what it would feel like when you were made into a Christian. Would it be like a miracle? Like the devils coming out of the sick man and going into the herd of swine? She felt queer and tickly in the pit of her stomach.
“When will it start, Mother? Mother, when will it start?” she whispered urgently, and sidling up to her mother, she took her arm and put it round her own shoulders.
“Presently, dear. Now, Joanna, I want you to talk to your Great-Aunt Joanna. She’s your godmother. Remember to curtsy and to speak into her trumpet. And if she asks you questions, dear, answer her truthfully and politely.”
Great-Aunt Joanna, perhaps dozing a little, perhaps fallen into a reverie, did not at first notice her great-niece , so Joanna took the ear trumpet and breathed into it the word “godmother.” She thought her great-aunt looked fearfully like the picture of the witch in Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.
The old lady turned her head as quickly as a bird, and saw that the child was frightened. “You need not curtsy to me, little Joanna,” she said kindly. “I like little girls. When I was young, people used to frighten me, too, but you must not be afraid of me. Come here, goddaughter.” She made Joanna sit on a leather hassock and smiled down at her.… “She is a beautiful child,” the old lady thought, “but such an odd, elfin, little face.”
She said to Joanna:
“Do you know, Joanna, that I was once a little girl rather like you?”
“Yes,” said Joanna, but it was a child’s answer, for she had no real sense of time passing and of herself growing old like Great-Aunt Joanna.
“Joanna, bring me that small photograph from the mantelpiece.”
Joanna brought her a daguerreotype of a child in a velvet crinoline. She had to tilt it to just the right angle to make the small, stiff figure appear from the background.
“Do you see that she has brown curls to her shoulders just like you?”
“Oh, Great-Aunt Joanna, is that really you?”
“It was, Joanna.… Now let me see what sort of a child my goddaughter is. Do you love your brothers?”
“Oh, yes! ’Specially Dan. I love him awfully.” She went on with a rush of confidence: “Sometimes when I don’t feel very well I am cross.”
“So are we all.… Do you go to church? Did you go this morning, Joanna?”
“Yes,” said Joanna, pleased.
“Tell me about the sermon.”
“All of it?”
“Why, yes, whatever you can remember.”
“The text, too? Everything he said?”
Surprised at the girl’s eagerness, Aunt Joanna nodded with a smile. Joanna settled herself comfortably on the hassock and a faraway look came into her eyes.
“The third chapter of the Book of Job, and the third verse,” she announced in a low, intense voice; then with a slight alteration of tone: “The third chapter of the Book of Job, and the third verse. Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.”
Aunt Joanna moved uneasily and put down her trumpet for a moment. The note of human despair on a child’s lips sounded eerie and dreadful.… But how perfectly and how unconsciously the child mimicked with her thin voice the intonations of a theatrical preacher. The old lady began to think: “I ought not to have —”
“My
