Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/148

 "Eat your rice pudding.'

"I don't want it—it's loathsome."

Mrs. Bertrand stared at her daughter. "Loathsome! What kind of a language is that about good rice pudding your father works hard to give you and I slave to cook for you? Shame on you."

Mr. Bertrand, still sucking his teeth, regarded his family coldly. Jabber, jabber, jabber. Grub was grub. Sometimes he wondered why he had married; sure tied a man down. You could get a woman for a few dollars once in a while when you felt like it. Then you're free all the time. It ought to be his right to travel as he pleased instead of those two next door. The U.S. was in a bad way when a woman and a girl could get away with things like that.

"And let me tell you not to use such damned language around here or I'll slap your mouth," he growled, waggling a grubby finger.

For days thereafter Vida mooned about pretending to be engrossed in a pile of library books and stacks of writing paper whenever Lucy came out. Lucy found this pretended lack of interest tiresome. She was discovering, and it puzzled her, that news of their coming journey did not inspire the friendly interest the hepaticas had aroused. Twelfth Street was resentful that the two fly-by-nights had not been permanently caged and that it was to be deprived of its principal item of excitement, gossip and tsk-tsking.

All of Twelfth Street, that is, but old Mrs. Winters in the second last house from the corner, who declared Mae and Lucy showed spunk and then painted her door and windows turkey-red "to make them look cheerful." But then everyone on Twelfth Street knew Mrs. Winters was crazy.

Chapter 14

INITIATION

" to have a going-away party for you here in the studio," Clem said a week before August 1st.

"That'd be lovely," Lucy said in the consoling tone she had found herself adopting toward Clem since she told him Mae had bought the railroad tickets. 136