Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/346

320 Besides her wonderful smile Millie had a purring way of talking. It was a sort of vocal accompaniment to the smile, soft and low, and of a smooth, creamy sweetness that you felt was almost too good to be true. It was what we used to call a Sunday voice, one that could be used when visiting or on holidays. She had quite a different tone for her maid,—one with shingle-nails and broken glass and mixed pickles in it.

It was interesting to note that Millie was a young woman of whims as well as frills. She, too, was used to being humored, and plainly it was the wise thing to let her have her own way. The timid manner of her maid suggested as much. This trait seemed to amuse Roscoe immensely, as did a few others. Millie could sulk charmingly. She was prettiest when she pouted. In fact, their cooing was a series of petty squabbles about nothing at all. For a half-hour at a time Millie would turn her back on him, ignore entirely his ornamental presence, and then, just before his patience was exhausted, bring him to her feet with one of those smiles which were such triumphs of art. These were her sun-parlor tactics.

Almost pathetic was the distress of Mother Peppergrin as she watched it all from the background. That had become her position, the remote background. If she had been a secondary figure before, now she was no more than a faint cipher. Taking Roscoe as her model, Millie improved on the pattern. She replied to the observations, suggestions, or queries of Mrs. Peppergrin with a stare that seemed to go through the good lady and come out somewhere on the other side. As a photographer would say, Mrs. Peppergrin was continually out of focus. The observant Roscoe regarded this with high good humor. It was something which he could appreciate to the utmost.

We left them in this stage, expecting never to see them again, for two seasons had been quite enough of these particular pines. More than a year passed. Roscoe and Millie had been almost forgotten, when, one hot July day, as we were flitting from torrid city to torrid seashore, there entered the Pullman our old acquaintances. Millie had become Mrs. Roscoe Peppergrin. No one told us that, but, somehow, we knew. Perhaps it was because she no longer used her Sunday voice.

"I will not sit there," she was saying. It was the broken-glass-and-mixed-pickles tone. "I will not, I tell you. That's the sunny side. I shall sit here."

"But our chairs are on this side, my dear," protested Roscoe, and in his eyes could be read a reluctance to face what impended.

"Have them changed, then."

"But all these are sold; the conductor told me so."

"Go back and tell him that I shall sit here." There was a finality about this decree which Roscoe could not mistake.

For a moment we thought he was going to rebel. His fingers clutched desperately about the roll of sunshades and umbrellas. He shut his teeth, narrowed his eyelids, and stood irresolute in the aisle, an object of lively interest for two scores of eyes. Millie unconcernedly opened a magazine and settled herself comfortably. Roscoe gave up. During his ten-minute talk with the uniformed car autocrat we watched Roscoe's haughty demeanor wilt and crumple as a fat man's collar wilts when he runs for a trolley. Only after he had thoroughly humbled himself was his mission successful.

"It's all right, my dear; I've had yours changed," he whispered as he returned.

"Get me a glass of ice-water," was Millie's response. Then the train pulled out.

Perhaps it was uncharitable, but, on sober reflection, we agreed that not only was Millie worthy of him, but that they were worthy of each other.



