"The doll is called the rabbit doll, though there is no reason why it should be, as it only looks the least tiny bit like a rabbit, and is a girl. Its other name is Gwendolyn, and it always goes to bed with her.

Mrs. O'Farrels aunt said that children always stopped playing with dolls when they got to be as big as Eleanor, but she isn't never going to stop.--You must get after that double negative, Beulah.--She once wrote a poem beginning: 'The rabbit doll, it is my own.' She thinks that she has a frog-like expression of face, and that is why Beulah doesn't like her better. She is perfectly willing to have her adenoids cut out, if Beulah thinks it would improve her, but she doesn't want to 'take anything,' when she has it done."

"You are a wonder, Gram," Gertrude said admiringly.

"Oh! I have made a mess of it, haven't I?" Beulah said. "Is she homesick?"

"Yes, she's homesick," Peter said gravely, "but not for anything she's left in Colha.s.sett. David told you the story, didn't he?--She is homesick for her own kind, for people she can really love, and she's never found any of them. Her grandfather and grandmother are old and decrepit. She feels a terrible responsibility for them, but she doesn't love them, not really. She's too hungry to love anybody until she finds the friends she can cling to--without compromise."

"An emotional aristocrat," Gertrude murmured. "It's the curse of taste."

"Help! Help!" Jimmie cried, grimacing at Gertrude. "Didn't she have any kids her own age to play with?"

"She had 'em, but she didn't have any time to play with them. You forget she was supporting a family all the time, Jimmie."

"By jove, I'd like to forget it."

"She had one friend named Albertina Weston that she used to run around with in school. Albertina also wrote poetry. They used to do poetic 'stunts' of one poem a day on some subject selected by Albertina. I think Albertina was a sn.o.b. She candidly admitted to Eleanor that if her clothes were more stylish, she would go round with her more.

Eleanor seemed to think that was perfectly natural."

"How do you do it, Peter?" Jimmie besought. "If I could get one damsel, no matter how tender her years, to confide in me like that I'd be happy for life. It's nothing to you with those eyes, and that matinee forehead of yours; but I want 'em to weep down my neck, and I can't make 'em do it."

"Wait till you grow up, Jimmie, and then see what happens," Gertrude soothed him.

"Wait till it's your turn with our child," Margaret said. "In two months more she's coming to you."

"Do I ever forget it for a minute?" Jimmie cried.

"The point of the whole business is," Peter continued, "that we've got a human soul on our hands. We imported a kind of scientific plaything to exercise our spiritual muscle on, and we've got a real specimen of womanhood in embryo. I don't know whether the situation appalls you as much as it does me--" He broke off as he heard the bell ring.

"That's David, he said he was coming."

Then as David appeared laden with the lost carpetbag and a huge box of chocolates, he waved him to a chair, and took up his speech again. "I don't know whether the situation appalls you, as much as it does me--if I don't get this off my chest now, David, I can't do it at all--but the thought of that poor little waif in there and the struggle she's had, and the shy valiant spirit of her,--the sand that she's got, the _sand_ that put her through and kept her mouth shut through experiences that might easily have killed her, why I feel as if I'd give anything I had in the world to make it up to her, and yet I'm not altogether sure that I could--that we could--that it's any of our business to try it."

"There's n.o.body else who will, if we don't," David said.

"That's it," Peter said, "I've never known any one of our bunch to quit anything that they once started in on, but just by way of formality there is one thing we ought to do about this proposition before we slide into it any further, and that is to agree that we want to go on with it, that we know what we're in for, and that we're game."

"We decided all that before we sent for the kid," Jimmie said, "didn't we?"

"We decided we'd adopt a child, but we didn't decide we'd adopt this one. Taking the responsibility of this one is the question before the house just at present."

"The idea being," David added, "that she's a fairly delicate piece of work, and as time advances she's going to be _delicater_."

"And that it's an awkward matter to play with souls," Beulah contributed; whereupon Jimmie murmured, "Browning," sotto voice.

"She may be all that you say, Gram," Jimmie said, after a few minutes of silence, "a thunderingly refined and high-minded young waif, but you will admit that without an interpreter of the same cla.s.s, she hasn't been much good to us so far."

"Good lord, she isn't refined and high-minded," Peter said. "That's not the idea. She's simply supremely sensitive and full of the most pathetic possibilities. If we're going to undertake her we ought to realize fully what we're up against, and acknowledge it,--that's all I'm trying to say, and I apologize for a.s.suming that it's more my business than anybody's to say it."

"That charming humility stuff, if I could only remember to pull it."

The sofa pillow that Gertrude aimed at Jimmie hit him full on the mouth and he busied himself pretending to eat it. Beulah scorned the interruption.

"Of course, we're going to undertake her," Beulah said. "We are signed up and it's all down in writing. If anybody has any objections, they can state them now." She looked about her dramatically. On every young face was reflected the same earnestness that set gravely on her own.

"The 'ayes' have it," Jimmie murmured. "From now on I become not only a parent, but a soul doctor." He rose, and tiptoed solemnly toward the door of Eleanor's room.

"Where are you going, Jimmie?" Beulah called, as he was disappearing around the bend in the corridor.

He turned back to lift an admonitory finger.

"Shush," he said, "do not interrupt me. I am going to wrap baby up in a blanket and bring her out to her mothers and fathers."

CHAPTER V

ELEANOR ENJOYS HERSELF IN HER OWN WAY

"I am in society here," Eleanor wrote to her friend Albertina, with a pardonable emphasis on that phase of her new existence that would appeal to the haughty ideals of Miss Weston, "I don't have to do any housework, or anything. I sleep under a pink silk bedquilt, and I have all new clothes. I have a new black pattern leather sailor hat that I sopose you would laugh at. It cost six dollars and draws the sun down to my head but I don't say anything. I have six aunts and uncles all diferent names and ages but grown up. Uncle Peter is the most elderly, he is twenty-five. I know becase we gave him a birthday party with a cake. I sat at the table. I wore my c.r.a.pe da shine dress. You would think that was pretty, well it is. There is a servant girl to do evry thing even pa.s.sing your food to you on a tray. I wish you could come to visit me. I stay two months in a place and get broghut up there.

Aunt Beulah is peculiar but nice when you know her. She is stric and at first I thought we was not going to get along. She thought I had adenoids and I thought she dislikt me too much, but it turned out not.

I take lessons from her every morning like they give at Rogers College, not like publick school. I have to think what I want to do a good deal and then do it. At first she turned me loose to enjoy myself and I could not do it, but now we have disapline which makes it all right. My speling is weak, but uncle Peter says Stevanson could not spel and did not care. Stevanson was the poat who wrote the birdie with a yellow bill in the reader. I wish you would tel me if Grandma's eye is worse and what about Grandfather's rheumatism.

"Your fond friend, Eleanor.

"P. S. We have a silver organ in all the rooms to have heat in. I was afrayd of them at first."

In the letters to her grandparents, however, the undercurrent of anxiety about the old people, which was a ruling motive in her life, became apparent.

"Dear Grandma and Dear Grandpa," she wrote,

"I have been here a weak now. I inclose my salary, fifteen dollars ($15.00) which I hope you will like. I get it for doing evry thing I am told and being adoptid besides. You can tell the silectmen that I am rich now and can support you just as good as Uncle Amos. I want Grandpa to buy some heavy undershurts right of. He will get a couff if he doesn't do it. Tell him to rub your arm evry night before you go to bed, Grandma, and to have a hot soapstone for you. If you don't have your bed hot you will get newmonia and I can't come home to take care of you, becase my salary would stop. I like New York better now that I have lived here some. I miss seeing you around, and Grandpa.

"The cook cooks on a gas stove that is very funny. I asked her how it went and she showed me it. She is going to leve, but lucky thing the hired girl can cook till Aunt Beulah gets a nother cook as antyseptic as this cook. In Rogers College they teach ladies to have their cook's and hired girl's antyseptic. It is a good idear becase of sickness. I inclose a recipete for a good cake. You can make it sating down. You don't have to stir it much, and Grandpa can bring you the things. I will write soon. I hope you are all right. Let me hear that you are all right. Don't forget to put the cat out nights. I hope she is all right, but remember the time she stole the b.u.t.ter fish. I miss you, and I miss the cat around. Uncle David pays me my salary out of his own pocket, because he is the richest, but I like Uncle Peter the best. He is very handsome and we like to talk to each other the best.

Goodbye, Eleanor."

But it was on the varicolored pages of a ruled tablet--with a picture on its cover of a pink cheeked young lady beneath a cherry tree, and marked in large straggling letters also varicolored "The Cherry Blossom Tablet"--that Eleanor put down her most sacred thoughts. On the outside, just above the cherry tree, her name was written with a pencil that had been many times wet to get the desired degree of blackness, "Eleanor Hamlin, Colha.s.sett, Ma.s.sachusetts. Private Dairy,"

and on the first page was this warning in the same painstaking, heavily shaded chirography, "This book is sacrid, and not be trespased in or read one word of. By order of owner. E. H."

It was the private diary and Gwendolyn, the rabbit doll, and a small blue china shepherdess given her by Albertina, that const.i.tuted Eleanor's _lares et penates_. When David had finally succeeded in tracing the ancient carpetbag in the lost and found department of the cab company, Eleanor was able to set up her household G.o.ds, and draw from them that measure of strength and security inseparable from their familiar presence. She always slept with two of the three beloved objects, and after Beulah had learned to understand and appreciate the child's need for unsupervised privacy, she divined that the little girl was happiest when she could devote at least an hour or two a day to the transcribing of earnest sentences on the pink, blue and yellow pages of the Cherry Blossom Tablet, and the mysterious games that she played with the rabbit doll. That these games consisted largely in making the rabbit doll impersonate Eleanor, while the child herself became in turn each one of the six uncles and aunts, and exhorted the victim accordingly, did not of course occur to Beulah. It did occur to her that the pink, blue and yellow pages would have made interesting reading to Eleanor's guardians, if they had been privileged to read all that was chronicled there.