"I quarreled with the ten Hutchinsons. I am very sorry. They laughed at me too much for being a little girl and a Cape Codder, but they could if they wanted to, but when they laughed at Aunt Margaret for adopting me and the tears came in her eyes I could not bare it. I did not let the cat out of the bag, but I made it jump out. The Grandfather asked me when I was going back to Cape Cod, and I said I hoped never, and then I said I was going to visit Uncle Peter and Aunt Gertrude and Uncle David next. They said 'Uncle David--do you mean David Bolling?' and I did, so I said 'yes.' Then all the Hutchinsons pitched into Aunt Margaret and kept laughing and saying, 'Who is this mysterious child anyway, and how is it that her guardians intrust her to a crowd of scatter brain youngsters for so long?' and then they said 'Uncle David Bolling--_what_ does his mother say?' Then Aunt Margaret got very red in the face and the tears started to come, and I said 'I am not a mysterious child, and my Uncle David is as much my Uncle David as they all are,' and then I said 'My Aunt Margaret has got a perfect right to have me intrusted to her at any time, and not to be laughed at for it,' and I went and stood in front of her and gave her my handkercheve.

"Well I am glad somebody has been told that I am properly adoptid, but I am sorry it is the ten Hutchinsons who know."

CHAPTER IX

PETER

Uncle Peter treated her as if she were grown up; that was the wonderful thing about her visit to him,--if there could be one thing about it more wonderful than another. From the moment when he ushered her into his friendly, low ceiled drawing-room with its tiers upon tiers of book shelves, he admitted her on terms of equality to the miraculous order of existence that it was the privilege of her life to share. The pink silk coverlet and the elegance of the silver coated steampipes at Beulah's; the implacable British stuffiness at the Winchester which had had its own stolid charm for the lineal descendant of the Pilgrim fathers; the impressively casual atmosphere over which the "hired butler" presided distributing after-dinner gold spoons, these impressions all dwindled and diminished and took their insignificant place in the background of the romance she was living and breathing in Peter's jewel box of an apartment on Thirtieth Street.

Even to more sophisticated eyes than Eleanor's the place seemed to be a realized ideal of charm and homeliness. It was one of the older fashioned duplex apartments designed in a more aristocratic decade for a more fastidious generation, yet sufficiently adapted to the modern insistence on technical convenience. Peter owed his home to his married sister, who had discovered it and leased it and settled it and suddenly departed for a five years' residence in China with her husband, who was as she so often described him, "a blooming Englishman, and an itinerant banker." Peter's domestic affairs were despatched by a large, motherly Irishwoman, whom Eleanor approved of on sight and later came to respect and adore without reservation.

Peter's home was a home with a place in it for her--a place that it was perfectly evident was better with her than without her. She even slept in the bed that Peter's sister's little girl had occupied, and there were pictures on the walls that had been selected for her.

She had been very glad to make her escape from the Hutchinson household. Her "quarrel" with them had made no difference in their relation to her. To her surprise they treated her with an increase of deference after her outburst, and every member of the family, excepting possibly Hugh Hutchinson senior, was much more carefully polite to her. Margaret explained that the family really didn't mind having their daughter a party to the experiment of cooperative parenthood. It appealed to them as a very interesting try-out of modern educational theory, and their own theories of the independence of the individual modified their criticism of Margaret's secrecy in the matter, which was the only criticism they had to make since Margaret had an income of her own accruing from the estate of the aunt for whom she had been named.

"It is very silly of me to be sensitive about being laughed at,"

Margaret concluded. "I've lived all my life surrounded by people suffering from an acute sense of humor, but I never, never, never shall get used to being held up to ridicule for things that are not funny to me."

"I shouldn't think you would," Eleanor answered devoutly.

In Peter's house there was no one to laugh at her but Peter, and when Peter laughed she considered it a triumph. It meant that there was something she said that he liked. The welcome she had received as a guest in his house and the wonderful evening that succeeded it were among the epoch making hours in Eleanor's life. It had happened in this wise.

The Hutchinson victoria, for Grandmother Hutchinson still clung to the old-time, stately method of getting about the streets of New York, had left her at Peter's door at six o'clock of a keen, cool May evening.

Margaret had not been well enough to come with her, having been prostrated by one of the headaches of which she was a frequent victim.

The low door of ivory white, beautifully carved and paneled, with its mammoth bra.s.s knocker, the row of window boxes along the cornice a few feet above it, the very look of the house was an experience and an adventure to her. When she rang, the door opened almost instantly revealing Peter on the threshold with his arms open. He had led her up two short flights of stairs--ivory white with carved banisters, she noticed, all as immaculately shining with soap and water as a Cape Cod interior--to his own gracious drawing-room where Mrs. Finnigan was bowing and smiling a warmhearted Irish welcome to her. It was like a wonderful story in a book and her eyes were shining with joy as Uncle Peter pulled out her chair and she sat down to the first meal in her honor. The grown up box of candy at her plate, the grave air with which Peter consulted her tastes and her preferences were all a part of a beautiful magic that had never quite touched her before.

She had been like a little girl in a dream pa.s.sing dutifully or delightedly through the required phases of her experience, never quite believing in its permanence or reality; but her life with Uncle Peter was going to be real, and her own. That was what she felt the moment she stepped over his threshold.

After their coffee before the open fire--she herself had had "cambric"

coffee--Peter smoked his cigar, while she curled up in silence in the twin to his big cushioned chair and sampled her chocolates. The blue flames skimmed the bed of black coals, and finally settled steadily at work on them nibbling and sputtering until the whole grate was like a basket full of molten light, glowing and golden as the hot sun when it sinks into the sea.

Except to offer her the ring about his slender Panatela, and to ask her if she were happy, Peter did not speak until he had deliberately crushed out the last spark from his stub and thrown it into the fire.

The ceremony over, he held out his arms to her and she slipped into them as if that moment were the one she had been waiting for ever since the white morning looked into the window of the lavender dressing-room on Morningside Heights, and found her awake and quite cold with the excitement of thinking of what the day was to bring forth.

"Eleanor," Peter said, when he was sure she was comfortably arranged with her head on his shoulder, "Eleanor, I want you to feel at home while you are here, really at home, as if you hadn't any other home, and you and I belonged to each other. I'm almost too young to be your father, but--"

"Oh! are you?" Eleanor asked fervently, as he paused.

"--But I can come pretty near feeling like a father to you if it's a father you want. I lost my own father when I was a little older than you are now, but I had my dear mother and sister left, and so I don't know what it's like to be all alone in the world, and I can't always understand exactly how you feel, but you must always remember that I want to understand and that I will understand if you tell me. Will you remember that, Eleanor?"

"Yes, Uncle Peter," she said soberly; then perhaps for the first time since her babyhood she volunteered a caress that was not purely maternal in its nature. She put up a shy hand to the cheek so close to her own and patted it earnestly. "Of course I've got my grandfather and grandmother," she argued, "but they're very old, and not very affectionate, either. Then I have all these new aunts and uncles pretending," she was penetrating to the core of the matter, Peter realized, "that they're just as good as parents. Of course, they're just as good as they can be and they take so much trouble that it mortifies me, but it isn't just the same thing, Uncle Peter!"

"I know," Peter said, "I know, dear, but you must remember we mean well."

"I don't mean you; it isn't you that I think of when I think about my co--co-woperative parents, and it isn't any of them specially,--it's just the idea of--of visiting around, and being laughed at, and not really belonging to anybody."

Peter's arms tightened about her.

"Oh! but you do belong, you do belong. You belong to me, Eleanor."

"That was what I hoped you would say, Uncle Peter," she whispered.

They had a long talk after this, discussing the past and the future; the past few months of the experiment from Eleanor's point of view, and the future in relation to its failures and successes. Beulah was to begin giving her lessons again and she was to take up music with a visiting teacher on Peter's piano. (Eleanor had not known it was a piano at first, as she had never seen a baby grand before. Peter did not know what a triumph it was when she made herself put the question to him.)

"If my Aunt Beulah could teach me as much as she does and make it as interesting as Aunt Margaret does, I think I would make her feel very proud of me," Eleanor said. "I get so nervous saving energy the way Aunt Beulah says for me to that I forget all the lesson. Aunt Margaret tells too many stories, I guess, but I like them."

"Your Aunt Margaret is a child of G.o.d," Peter said devoutly, "in spite of her raw-boned, intellectual family."

"Uncle David says she's a daughter of the fairies."

"She's that, too. When Margaret's a year or two older you won't feel the need of a mother."

"I don't now," said Eleanor; "only a father,--that I want you to be, the way you promised."

"That's done," Peter said. Then he continued musingly, "You'll find Gertrude--different. I can't quite imagine her presiding over your moral welfare but I think she'll be good at it. She's a good deal of a person, you know."

"Aunt Beulah's a good kind of person, too," Eleanor said; "she tries hard. The only thing is that she keeps trying to make me express myself, and I don't know what that means."

"Let me see if I can tell you," said Peter. "Self-expression is a part of every man's duty. Inside we are all trying to be good and true and fine--"

"Except the villains," Eleanor interposed. "People like Iago aren't trying."

"Well, we'll make an exception of the villains; we're talking of people like us, pretty good people with the right instincts. Well then, if all the time we're trying to be good and true and fine, we carry about a blank face that reflects nothing of what we are feeling and thinking, the world is a little worse off, a little duller and heavier place for what is going on inside of us."

"Well, how can we make it better off then?" Eleanor inquired practically.

"By not thinking too much about it for one thing, except to remember to smile, by trying to be just as much at home in it as possible, by letting the kind of person we are trying to be show through on the outside. By gosh! I wish Beulah could hear me."

"By just not being bashful, do you mean?"

"That's the idea."

"Well, when Aunt Beulah makes me do those dancing exercises, standing up in the middle of the floor and telling me to be a flower and express myself as a flower, does she just mean not to be bashful?"

"Something like that: she means stop thinking of yourself and go ahead--"

"But how can I go ahead with her sitting there watching?"

"I suppose I ought to tell you to imagine that you had the soul of a flower, but I haven't the nerve."

"You've got nerve enough to do anything," Eleanor a.s.sured him, but she meant it admiringly, and seriously.