Page:MacGrath--The luck of the Irish.djvu/201

 they wanted at home. They could put up with it there because they had to; but at school they considered any such advances as an encroachment upon their prerogatives. True, they would come running to her fast enough when they were hurt; but this was in quest of justice or sympathy, and teachers were the only grown-ups at hand.

So she awoke with the discovery that for several weeks, in fact since the landing at Naples, she had been mothering William Grogan, rescuing him from greedy shopkeepers, suppressing his careless generosity in the matter of tips, seeing to it that he never left anything on trains, warning him against sea-food in inland towns, teaching him by degrees what she knew of art and literature despite the fact that most of it went into one ear and out of the other.

Ruth gathered up her brush and comb from the little stand at the side of the bed and began brushing and combing her hair, which was golden-brown like the nest of a ripe chestnut. Her skin was fine and firmly padded, with a hint of gold in the soft, curving shadows. Her cambric night-gown, short in sleeve and loose at the shoulders, revealed vaguely the lovely contours of her young body. But as in William, her chief attraction lay in her eyes, deep gray, flecked with the variegated browns of an October leaf.

Mothering William Grogan with his shock of red hair, his amazing blue eyes, his irrepressible good humor, his irresponsible generosity! She laughed and rocked her body. It was so funny. Argu-