Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/19

 us a story of some remarkable freak calf be had seen, with three legs, and Perry said,

“‘Oh, nothing to a duck I saw once in Norway.’

“(Perry really was in Norway. He used to sail everywhere with his father when he was little. But I don't believe one word about that duck. He wasn’t —he was just . Dear Mr. Carpenter, I get along without italics.)

“Perry’s duck had four legs, according to him—two where a proper duck’s legs should be, and two sprouting from its back. And when it got tired of walking on its ordinary pair it flopped over on its back and walked on the other pair!

“Perry told this yarn with a sober face, and everybody laughed, and Amy’s uncle said, ‘Go up head, Perry.’ But Ilse was furious and wouldn’t speak to him all the way home. She said he had made a fool of himself, trying to ‘show off’ with a silly story like that, and that would act so.

“Perry said: ‘I’m no gentleman, yet, only a hired boy, but some day, Miss Ilse, I'll be a finer gentleman than any one know.’

“‘Gentlemen,’ said Ilse in a nasty voice, ‘have to be. They can’t be, you know.’

“Ilse has almost given up calling names, as she used to do when she quarrelled with Perry or me, and taken to saying cruel, cutting things. They hurt far worse than the names used to, but I don’t really mind them—much—or long—because I know Ilse doesn’t mean them and really loves me as much as I love her. But Perry says they stick in his crop. They didn’t speak to each other the rest of the way home; but next day Ilse was at him again about using bad grammar and not standing up when a lady enters the room.

“‘Of course you couldn’t be expected to know ,’ she said in her nastiest voice, ‘but I am sure Mr. Carpenter has done his best to teach you grammar.’