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Updated: June 29, 2025
The woman turned wildly and darted into the little bedroom. The man listened. He whistled in surprise almost comical. He had forgotten the baby. He could hear the mother talking, cooing. "Mommie's 'ittle pet. She wasn't goin' to leave her 'ittle man-no, she wasn't! There, there, don't 'e cry. Mommie ain't goin' away and leave him-wicked Mommie ain't-'ittle treasure!"
"Mommie doesn't seem to get much better. I'm worried about her. She seems to have let go, somehow. She never talks about the ranch much, or even worries about whether Phoebe is keeping the windows washed. She talks about when she was a little girl, and about when she and daddy were first married. It gets on my nerves to see how she has slipped out of every-day life.
Then he grinned in his triumph. "William Louisa, if you get your feet wet, your mommie will take a club to you," he reminded her sternly. Whereupon he took the broom and proceeded to give that floor a real man's scrubbing, refusing to quarrel with Billy Louise, who scolded like a cross old woman from the table except when she simply had to stop and laugh heartily at his violent method of cleaning.
Billy Louise herself had pulled up her reserves of strength and cheerfulness, and the fingers she laid on her mother's forehead were cool and steady. "Poor old mommie! Is it that nasty lumbago again?" she asked caressingly and did not permit the tiniest shade of anxiety to spoil the reassurance of her presence.
I'd have come home a-running if I'd known she was sick and had to have nasty, soppy stuff." In the kitchen a very different Billy Louise measured spices, and asked a question now and then in a whisper, and breathed with a repressed unevenness which betrayed the strain she was under. "Tell John to saddle up and go for the doctor, Phoebe, and don't let mommie know, whatever you do.
"A man can get out and do things. And a woman why, even Ward seems to think it's perfectly wonderful, mommie, that we don't just about starve, with me running the ranch! I know he does. Every time I do a thing right or pay off a note or anything, he looks as if "
Her mother shook her agitatedly by the arm. "Billy Louise! Wake up!" "All right, mommie." Billy Louise lay down and snuggled the light blanket over her shoulders. She had been awake and thinking, thinking till she thought she never could stop, but she did not tell mommie that. She went to sleep and dreamed about poisoned wolves till it is a wonder she did not have a real nightmare.
If the Louise of me had been developed at the expense of the Billy of me, and I'd taken to making battenburg doilies with butterflies in the corners, and embroidering corset covers till I put my eyes out, and writing poetry on Sundays when mommie wouldn't let me sew. I wonder if Ward Maybe he'd have liked me better if I'd lived up to the Louise and cut out the Billy part.
For the life of her she could not feel that it mattered whether the windows were clean or dirty; life was drab and cheerless outside them, anyway. Billy Louise in the last few months had tried to picture herself alone, with mommie gone. Her imagination was too alive and saw too clearly the possibilities for her never to have dwelt upon this very crisis in her life.
Perhaps he would come out and help her down from the stage, when it stopped at the gate, and call her Bill-Loo never once had Ward spoken her name as others spoke it, but always with a twist of his own which made it different, stamped with his own individuality and he would walk beside her to the house and comfort her with his eyes, and never mention mommie till she herself opened the way to her grief.
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