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Updated: June 22, 2025
The sufferings of the arrogant are not wholly depressing to the spectator; and of arrogance Hedrick had ever been a master. She began to shake; a convulsion took her, and suddenly she sat upon the curbstone without dignity, and laughed as he had never seen her. A horrid distrust of her rose within him: he began to realize in what plight he stood, what terrors o'erhung.
"We'll pass that up just now," returned the other brusquely, and led him on. Madison was almost helpless: he murmured in a husky, uncertain voice, and suffered himself to be put to bed. There, the doctor "worked" with him; cold "applications" were ordered; Laura was summoned from the other sick-bed; Hedrick sent flying with prescriptions, then to telephone for a nurse.
No sign that he was aware came from the busied boy, though he coughed again, hollowly now a proof that he was an artist. "All right, Hedrick," she said kindly. "I heard you the first time." He looked up with utter incomprehension. "I'm afraid I've caught cold," he said, simply. "I got a good many weeds out before breakfast, and the ground was damp."
Hedrick flattened himself in a corner just inside the door. "I should break any engagement whatsoever if I had one," Mr. Corliss was saying with what the eavesdropper considered an offensively "foreign" accent and an equally unjustifiable gallantry; "but of course I haven't: I am so utterly a stranger here.
We used to call it his spook, but only once did we harness it to practical business and that was when old Charley Hedrick, the local boss, was picking a candidate for the Legislature. The reporter and Larmy asked the "father" one night if it could get us connected with Mr. Hedrick. It said it would try; it needed help.
"Told Cora yet?" he asked, with scornful laughter. "Told me what?" Cora looked quickly up from her plate. "Oh, nothing about this Corliss," he returned scathingly. "Don't get excited." "Hedrick!" remonstrated his mother, out of habit. "She never thinks of anything else these days," he retorted. "Rides with him every evening in his pe-rin-sley hired machine, doesn't she?"
Madison's illness was a settled institution in the household; the presence of the nurse lost novelty, even to Hedrick, and became a part of life; the day was measured by the three regular visits of the doctor.
He zigzagged desperately to and fro across the broad, empty backyard, a small hand ever and anon managing to clutch his shoulder, the awful petition in his ears: "Kiss me some more, darling little boy!" "Hedrick!" Emerging from the kitchen door, Laura stood and gazed in wonder as the two eerie figures sped by her, circled, ducked, dodged, flew madly on.
She turned her face to him and smiled and there was something about her smile which Hedrick did not like. It discomforted him; nothing more. In sunlight he would have had the better chance to comprehend; but, unhappily, this was moonshine. "Kiss me, little boy!" she said. "I won't!" exclaimed the shocked and indignant Hedrick, edging uneasily away from her. "Let's play," she said cheerfully.
Laura assisted in the pacification; Hedrick froze the ice-cream to an impenetrable solidity; and the nominal head of the family sat upon the front porch with the two young men, and wiped his wrists and rambled politically till they were summoned to the dining-room. Cora did the talking for the table.
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