"When she gets home Ime going to hug her I can't help it if it wont be keeping right on."

Article Seven

Rebecca Mary measured them. Against the woodshed wall, with chalk--it was not altogether an easy thing to do. The result startled her. With rather unsteady little fingers she measured from chalk mark to floor again, to make sure it was as bad as that. It was even a little worse.

"Oh," sighed Rebecca Mary, "to think they belong to me--to think they're hitched on!" She gazed down at them with scorn and was ashamed of them.

She tried to conceal their length with her brief skirts; but when she straightened up, there they were again, as long as ever. She sat down suddenly on the shed floor and drew them up underneath her. That was temporarily a relief. "If I sit here world without end n.o.body'll see 'em," grimly smiled Rebecca Mary.

It was her legs Rebecca Mary measured against the woodshed wall. It was her legs she was ashamed of. No wonder the minister's wife had said to the minister going home from meeting, with Rebecca Mary behind them unawares,--no wonder she had said, "Robert, HAVE you noticed Rebecca Mary's legs?"

Rebecca Mary had not heard the reply of the minister, for of course she had gone away then. If she had stayed she would have heard him say, with exaggerated prudery, "Felicia! My dear! Were you alluding to Rebecca Mary's limbs?" for the minister wickedly remembered inadvertent occasions when he himself had called legs legs.

"LEGS," the minister's wife repeated, calmly--"Rebecca Mary's are too long for limbs. Robert, that child will grow up one of these days!"

"They all do," sighed the minister. "It's human nature, dear. You'll be telling me next that there's something the matter with Rhoda's--legs."

The minister's wife gazed thoughtfully ahead at a little trio fast approaching the vanishing point. Her eyes grew a little wistful.

"There is now, perhaps, but I haven't noticed--I won't look!" she murmured. "And, anyway, Robert, Rhoda will give us a little time to get used to it in. But Rebecca Mary isn't the Rhoda kind--I don't believe Rebecca Mary will give us even three days of grace!"

"I always supposed Rebecca Mary was born that way--grown up," the minister remarked, tucking a gloved hand comfortably close under his arm. "I wouldn't let it worry me, dear."

"Oh, I don't--not worry, really," she said, smiling--"only her legs startled me a little today. If she were mine, I should let her dresses down."

"If she were Rhod--"

"She isn't, she's Rebecca Mary. Probably if I were Miss Olivia I would let Rhoda's down!" And she knew she would.

Rebecca Mary on the woodshed floor sat and thought "deep-down" thoughts.

Her eyes were fixed dreamily on a big knothole before her, and the thoughts seemed to come out of it and stand before her, demanding imperiously to be thought. One after another--a relentless procession.

"Think me," the first one had commanded. "I'm the Thought of Growing Up. I saw you measuring your legs, and I concluded it was time for me to introduce myself. I had to come some time, didn't I?"

"Oh yes," breathed Rebecca Mary, sadly. "I don't suppose I could expect you to stay in there always; but--but I'm not very glad to see you. You needn't have come so SUDDEN," she added, with gentle resentment.

The Thought of Growing Up crept into her mind and nestled down there. As thoughts go, it was not an unkind one.

"You'll get used to me sometime and like me," it said, comfortingly. But Rebecca Mary knew better. She drove it out.

Why must legs keep on growing and unwelcome Thoughts come out of knotholes? Why could not little girls keep on sewing stents and learning arithmetic and carrying beautiful doll-beings to bed? Why had the Lord created little girls like this--this growing kind?

"If I had made the world," began Rebecca Mary--but stopped in a hurry.

The irreverence of presuming to make a better world than the Lord shamed her.

"I suppose He knew best, but if He'd ever been a little girl--" This was worse than the other. Rebecca Mary hastily dismissed the world and its Maker from her musings for fear of further irreverences.

One Thought came out of the knothole, ill.u.s.trated. It was leading a tall woman-girl by the hand--no, it was pushing it as though the woman-girl were loath to come.

"Come along," urged the new Thought, laughingly. "Here she is--this is Rebecca Mary. Rebecca Mary, this is YOU! You needn't be afraid of each other, you two. Take a good long look and get acquainted."

The woman-girl was tall and straight. She had Rebecca Mary's hair, Rebecca Mary's eyes, mouth, little pointed chin. But not Rebecca Mary's legs--unless the long skirts covered them. She was rather comely and pleasant to look at. But Rebecca Mary tried not to look.

"She's got a lover---some day she'll be getting married," the new Thought said more abruptly, startlingly, than grammatically. And then with a little m.u.f.fled cry Rebecca Mary put out her hands and pushed the woman-girl away--back into the knothole whence she had come. The Thought, too, for she had no room in her mind for thoughts like that.

"My aunt Olivia wouldn't allow me to think of you," she explained in dismissing them. "And," with dignity she added, "neither would Rebecca Mary."

It was to be as the minister's wife had prophesied--there were to be not even the three days of grace allowed by law when Rebecca Mary grew up.

Sitting there with her legs, her poor little unappreciated legs, the innocent cause of the whole trouble, curled out of sight, Rebecca Mary planned that there should be but one day of grace. She would allow one day more to be a little girl in, and then she would grow up. But that one day--Rebecca Mary got up hastily and went to find Aunt Olivia.

"Aunt Olivia," she began, without preamble--Rebecca Mary never preambled--"Aunt Olivia, may I have a holiday tomorrow?"

Aunt Olivia was rocking in her easy chair on the porch. It had taken her sixty-two years to learn to sit in an easy chair and rock. Even now, and she had been home from the hospital many months, she felt a little as though the friendly birds that perched on the porch railing were twittering tauntingly, "Plummer! Plummer! Plummer!--rocking in an easy chair!"

"May I, Aunt Olivia?" It was an unusual occurrence for Rebecca Mary to ask again so soon. But this was an unusual occurrence. Aunt Olivia's thin face turned affectionately towards the child.

"School doesn't begin again tomorrow, does it?" she said in surprise.

Weren't all Rebecca Mary's days now holidays?

"Oh no---no'm. But I mean may I skip my stents? And--and may I soak the kettles and pans? Just tomorrow."

"Just tomorrow," repeated bewildered Aunt Olivia--"soak your--stents--"

"Because it's going to be a pretty busy day. It's going to be a--a celebration," Rebecca Mary said, softly. There was a strangely exalted look on her face. Oddly enough she was not afraid that Aunt Olivia would say no.

Aunt Olivia said yes. She did not ask any questions about the celebration, on account of the exalted look. She could wait. But the bewildered look stayed for a while on her thin face. Rebecca Mary was a queer child, a queer child--but she was a dear child. Dearness atoned for queerness in Aunt Olivia's creed.

The celebration began early the next morning before Aunt Olivia was up.

She lay in bed and heard it begin. Rebecca Mary out in the dewy garden was singing at the top of her voice. Aunt Olivia had never heard her sing like that before--not at the top. Her sweet, shrill voice sounded rather unacquainted with such free heights as that, and the woman in the bed wondered with a staid little smile if it did not make Rebecca Mary feel as she felt when she sat in the easy chair rocking.

Rebecca Mary sang hymns mostly, but interspersed in her programme were bits of Mother Goose set to original tunes--she had learned the Mother Goose of the minister's Littlest Little Boy--and original bits set to familiar tunes. It was a wild little orgy of song.

"My grief!" Aunt Olivia e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed under her breath; but she did not mean her grief. Other people might think Rebecca Mary was crazy--not Aunt Olivia. But yet she wondered a little and found it hard to wait.

Rebecca Mary washed the breakfast cup and plates, but put the pans and kettles to soak, and hurried away to her play. There was so much playing to be done before the sun set on her opportunity. She had made a little programme on a slip of paper, with approximate times allotted to each item. As:

Tree climbing... 1 hr.

(Do not tare anything) Mud pies... 1 hr. and 1/2.

(Do not get anything muddy) Tea party... 2 hrs.

(Do not break anything) Skipping... 1/2 hr.

Rebecca Mary had written 1 hr. at first opposite skipping, but it had rather appalled her to think of skipping for so long a period of time, and, with a sense of being already out of breath, she had hurriedly erased the 1 and subst.i.tuted 1/2. Underneath she had written, ("Do not tip over anything"). All the items had cautionary parentheses underneath them, for Rebecca Mary did not wish the celebration to injure "anything." Not this last day, when all the days of all the years before it, that had gone to make up her little girlhood, nothing had been torn or muddied or tipped over.

Rebecca Mary had never climbed trees, had never made mud pies, never had tea parties, nor skipped. It was with rather a hesitating step that she went forward to meet them all. She was even a little awed. But she went.