Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/307

 have brought them up here! I just did it to please myself! Once I saw 'em ... I wanted 'em!"

This seemed to me the wildest possible perversion of the Puritan instinct for self-condemnation and, half-vexed, I attempted some expostulation.

She stopped me with a look and gesture Dante might have had, "You ain't seen what I've seen."

I was half-frightened by her expression but tried to speak coolly. "Why, was it as bad as that paper said?" I asked.

She laid her hand on my arm, "Child, it was nothing like what the paper said ... it was so much worse!"

"Oh ..." I commented inadequately.

"I was five days looking for her ... they'd moved from the address the paper give. And, in those five days, I saw so many others ... so many others ..." her face twitched. She put one lean old hand before her eyes. Then, quite unexpectedly, she cast out at me an exclamation which made my notion of the pretty picturesqueness of her adventure seem cheap and trivial and superficial. "Jombatiste is right!" she cried to me with a bitter fierceness: "Everything is wrong! Everything is wrong! If I can do anything, I'd ought to do it to help them as want to smash everything up and start over! What good does it do for me to bring up here just these three out of all I saw ..." Her voice broke into pitiful, self-excusing quavers, "but when I saw them ... the baby was so sick ... and little Sigurd is so cunning ... he took to me right away, came to me the first thing ... this morning he wouldn't pick up his new rubbers off the floor for his mother, but, when I asked him, he did, right off ... you ought to have seen what he had on ...