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Rachael's tone was light, but as she spoke a cold premonition seized her heart. She fell silent. A moment later Charlotte, who had been hovering uncertainly in the doorway of the room, came out to join her mother with a brightly spontaneous air. "Oh, here you are, M'ma!" said Charlotte. "Are you ready to go?" "Been having a nice time, dear?" her mother asked fondly. "Very," Charlotte said.
"Aunt Rachael" the old name came naturally after seven years "you'll think I'm quite crazy coming here this way" Charlotte, as always, was justifying her shy little efforts at living "but M'ma was busy, and" the old, nervous gasp "and it seemed only friendly to come and and inquire " "Don't cry, dear!" said Rachael's rich, kind voice. She put a hand upon Charlotte's shoulder.
"We met Doctor Gregory and Charlie near the club this morning, M'ma," volunteered Isabelle. "And they asked about Mrs. Bowditch's dance," Charlotte added with a little innocent craft. "But I said that M'ma had been unable to decide. Of course I said that we would LIKE to go, and that you knew that, and would allow it if you possibly could." "That was quite right, dear," Mrs.
Haviland said to her oldest daughter, calmly ignoring the implied question, and to Isabelle she added kindly: "M'ma doesn't quite like to hear you calling a young man you hardly know by his first name, Isabelle.
"Excuse me, general, I don't belong to nobody," said the boy. "I can't be drafted. My poor mother wasn't married, and I was born in a field. I'm a son of the 'airth, as grandpa says. M'ma saved me from the army, that she did! My name ain't no more Mouche than nothing at all. Grandpa keeps telling me all my advantages.
"Have you no mother?" asked Madame de Montcornet, unable otherwise to explain the child's nakedness. "No, ma'am; m'ma died of grief for losing p'pa, who went to the army in 1812 without marrying her with papers, and got frozen, saving your presence. But I've my Grandpa Fourchon, who is a good man, though he does beat me bad sometimes."
"If M'ma doesn't object," said the dutiful daughter. "No, go along," Florence said with vague discontent. "I've got to do some telephoning, anyway." Charlotte, being eighteen, could think of nothing but herself, and Rachael, wrapped in her own romance, was amused, as they walked along, to see how different her display of youthful egotism was from Billy's, and yet how typical of all adolescence.
"I've been looking over old magazines in the library SO interesting!" This literary enthusiasm struck no answering spark from the matron. "In the library!" said Florence quickly. "Why, I thought you were with Charley!" "Oh, no, M'ma," answered Charlotte, with her little air that was not quite prim and not quite mincing, and that yet suggested both.
"Did you give my message to Miss Roper, Charlotte?" pursued the matron. "She wasn't at church, M'ma," said Charlotte, taken unawares and instinctively uneasy. "Mrs. Roper said she had a heavy cold; she said she'd been sleeping on the sleeping porch." "So M'ma's message was forgotten?" the mother asked pleasantly. Charlotte perceived herself to be in an extremely dangerous position.
The younger girl's shamed eyes met her mother's, and she nodded in quick embarrassment. But this tacit consent did not satisfy Mrs. Haviland. "You understand M'ma, don't you, dear?" she asked. Isabelle murmured something indistinguishable. "Yes, M'ma!" said that lady herself, encouragingly and briskly. Isabelle duly echoed a husky "Yes, M'ma!"
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