"Did you go home to ask permission, Eddy?" asked Charlotte, gravely.

Eddy nodded and hitched.

"Whom did you ask?"

Eddy hesitated. He was casting about in his mind for the lie likely to succeed.

"Whom?" repeated Charlotte.

"Amy."

"Amy just asked me if I knew where you were," said Charlotte, pitilessly.

Eddy looked intently at his b.u.t.terfly-book. "This is a whopper," said he.

"Come, Eddy," said Charlotte.

"This is the biggest one of all," said Eddy.

"Eddy," said Charlotte.

Eddy looked up. "I'm going to dinner with Mr. Anderson," said he.

"Aunt Anna said I might."

"You said Amy said you might," said Charlotte. "Eddy Carroll, don't you say another word. Come right home with me."

Then suddenly the boy broke down. All his bravado vanished. He looked from her to Anderson and back again with a white, convulsed little face. Eddy was a slight little fellow, and his poor shoulders in their linen blouse heaved. Then he wept like a baby.

"I--want to--go," he wailed. "Charlotte, I want to--g-o. He is going to have--roast beef for dinner, and I--am hungry."

Charlotte turned whiter than Eddy. She marched up to her brother. She did not look at Anderson. "Begging!" said she. "Begging! What if you are hungry? What of it? What is that? Hunger is nothing. And then you have no reason to be hungry. There is plenty in the house to eat--plenty!" She glanced with angry pride at Anderson, as if he were to blame for having heard all this. "Plenty!" she repeated, defiantly.

"Plenty of old cake left over from Ina's wedding, and dry old crackers, and not enough eggs to go round," returned Eddy. "I am hungry. I am, Charlotte. All I have had since yesterday noon is five crackers and three pickles and one egg and a piece of chocolate cake as hard as a brick, besides one little, round, dry cake with one almond on top in the middle. I'm real hungry, Charlotte. Please let me go!"

Anderson quietly went out of the office. He pa.s.sed through the store door, and stood there when presently Charlotte and Eddy pa.s.sed him.

"Good-morning," said Charlotte, in a choked voice.

Eddy looked at him and sniffled, then he flung out, angrily, "What you going to take to our house?" he demanded of the consumptive man gathering up the reins of the delivery-wagon.

"Hush!" said Charlotte.

"I won't hush," said Eddy. "I'm hungry. What are you taking up to our house? Say!"

"Some crackers and cheese and eggs," replied the man, wonderingly.

"Crackers and cheese and old store eggs!" cried Eddy, with a howl of woe, and Charlotte dragged him forcibly away.

"What ails that kid?" Riggs asked of the man in the wagon.

"I believe them folks are half starved," replied the man.

Riggs glanced cautiously around, but Anderson had returned to his office. "I don't believe anybody in town but us trusts 'em," said he, in a whisper.

"Well, I'm sorry for his folks, but he'd ought to be strung up," said the man. "Why in thunder don't he go to work. I guess if he was coughin' as bad as I be at night, an' had to work, he might know a little something about it. I ain't in debt, though, not a dollar."

Chapter XXIII

When a strong normal character which has consciously made wrong moves, averse to the established order of things, and so become a force of negation, comes into contact with weaker or undeveloped natures, it sometimes produces in them an actual change of moral fibre, and they become abnormal. Instead of a right quant.i.ty on the wrong track, they are a wrong quant.i.ty, and exactly in accordance with their environments. In the case of the Carroll family, Arthur Carroll, who was in himself of a perfect and una.s.sailable balance as to the right estimate of things, and the weighing of cause and effect, who had never in his whole life taken a step blindfold by any imperfection of spiritual vision, who had never for his own solace lost his own sense of responsibility for his lapses, had made his family, in a great measure, irresponsible for the same faults. Except in the possible case of Charlotte, all of them had a certain measure of perverted moral sense in the direction in which Carroll had consciously and unpervertedly failed. Anna Carroll, it is true, had her eyes more or less open, and she had much strength of character; still it was a feminine strength, and even she did not look at affairs as she might have done had she not been under the influence of her brother for years. While she at times waxed bitter over the state of affairs, it was more because of the constant irritation to her own pride, and her impatience at the restraints of an alien and dishonest existence, than from any moral scruples. Even Charlotte herself was scarcely clear-visioned concerning the family taint. The word debt had not to her its full meaning; the inalienable rights of others faded her comprehension when measured beside her own right of existence and of the comforts and delights of existence. Even to her a new hat or a comfortable meal was something of more importance than the need of the vender thereof for reimburs.e.m.e.nt. The value to herself was the first value, her birthright, indeed, which if others held they must needs yield up to her without money and without price, if her purse happened to be empty. Her compunction and sudden awakening of responsibility in the case of Randolph Anderson were due to an entirely different influence from any which had hitherto come into her life. Charlotte, although she was past the very first of young girlhood, being twenty, was curiously undeveloped emotionally.

She had never had any lovers, and the fault had been her own, from a strange persistence of childhood in her temperament. She had not attracted, from her own utter lack of responsiveness. She was like an instrument which will not respond to the touch on certain notes, and presently the player wearies.

She was a girl of strong and jealous affections, but the electric circuits in her nature were not yet established. Then, also, she had not been a child who had made herself the heroine of her own dreams, and that had hindered her emotional development.

"Charlotte," one of her school-mates, had asked her once, "do you ever amuse yourself by imagining that you have a lover?"

Charlotte had stared at the girl, a beautiful, early matured, innocently shameless creature. "No," said she. "I don't understand what you mean, Rosamond."

"The next moonlight night," said the girl, "Imagine that you have a lover."

"What if I did?"

"It would make you very happy, almost as happy as if you had a real one," said the girl, who was only a child in years, though, on account of her size, she had been put into long dresses. She had far outstripped the boys of her own age, who were rather shy of her.

Charlotte, who was still in short dresses, looked at her, full of scorn and a mysterious shame. "I don't want any lover at all,"

declared she. "I don't want an imaginary one, or a real one, either.

I've got my papa, and that's all I want." At that time Charlotte still clung to her doll, and the doll was in her mind, but she did not say doll to the other girl.

"Well, I don't care," said the other girl, defiantly. "You will sometime."

"I sha'n't, either," declared Charlotte. "I never shall be so silly, Rosamond Lane."

"You will, too."

"I never will. You needn't think because you are so awful silly everybody else is."

"I ain't any sillier than anybody else, and you'll be just as silly yourself, so now," said Rosamond.

After that, when Charlotte saw the child sitting sunken in a reverie with the color deepening on her cheeks, her lips pouting, and her eyes misty, she would pa.s.s indignantly. She remembered her in after years with contempt. She spoke of her to Ina as the silliest girl she had ever known.

Now the child's words of prophecy, spoken from the oldest reasoning in the world, that of established sequence and precedent, did not recur to Charlotte, but she was fulfilling them.

Ina's marriage and perhaps the natural principle of growth had brought about a change in her. Charlotte had sat by herself and thought a good deal after Ina had gone, and naturally she thought of the possibility of her own marriage. Ina had married; of course she might. But her emotions were very much in abeyance to her affections, and the conditions came before the dreams were possible.

"I shall never marry anybody who will take me far away from papa!"

said Charlotte. "Perhaps I shall be less of a burden to poor papa if I am married, but I shall never go far away."