Page:Scribner's Magazine, Volume 37-0036.jpg

20 started it. Connie Van Cott happened to be passing Miss Peck’s door, which was open, and she was sort of puttering around and dusting it and patting the couch pillows. And right behind Connie came the Pie and Miss Parrott; and the Pie said (in that nasty patronizing way of hers that makes you crazy to stick out your tongue and contradict):

“There is really an excellent wife lost to somebody in that poor creature: she is the most domestic soul in the world.”

“Is she?” says Polly Cracker (her name is Luella McCracken Parrott).

“Yes, indeed,” says the Pie, “she’d ask nothing better than to sew on buttons for the rest of her life. It’s a pity she hasn’t the opportunity.”

Now of course that was foolishness, because nobody would want to sew on buttons all their life, even if they were as old as Miss Peck, who must have been twenty-five or thirty. But Connie knew that she was willing to sew on some buttons, because she put one on her velvet coat once when Con was in a hurry and couldn’t wait for Miss Demarest. And so she wanted to do her a kindness in turn, to balance in her book. She kept a conduct-book, with all the good deeds on one side and the bad ones on the other, and then a page for the kind things that were done to her and one for those she did back. She used to balance it on Sundays, and whenever there were too many bad deeds she’d even it up by putting down as good deeds all the wicked things that she might have done, but didn’t. She called them Resisted Temptations, but we never believed they really counted, exactly, though it made her awfully mad if we said so.

So she decided that she best thing she could do to pay Miss Peck for the button was to find a husband for her. And she asked Ben to help her with it on account of her experience with Norah and the vegetable man. Well, Ben was interested, of course, but she didn’t see who we could get, because there are so few men that come to the school. And of course it would have to be a gentleman. There was J. Frank Hayward, that teaches singing, but we always thought he must be married, he was so fat. And there was Captain Edgar Millard the fencing master; but though his name sounds well, he is horrid, really, and nobody would want to marry him. He has the riding classes, too, and all the girls are terribly afraid of him, he is so cross and speaks so quick. Pinky West thought at one time she might fall in love with him, but he said that women and horses were the same thing when it came to managing them, and of course she hated him ever after. Then there is M. Duval, who comes for conversation every Tuesday; but if you could hear him sniffle once, it would be enough.

Nobody thought about Mr. Angell for a moment. He is small and he has rather pink cheeks and yellow hair, just like a little baby chicken. It is always mussed and ruffled, and the light shines through it so that every hair shows. He is quite bashful, too, though he isn’t young at all, and blushes quite a good deal. He is very polite—about the politest person I ever saw. One day we counted the number of times he said Excuse me and I beg your pardon and Thank you in one morning, and it was fifteen times for the first of these, and twelve times for the second, and thirty-four times for the third! But he can draw beautifully, just the same, one thing as well as another. Of course, anybody can draw some things—a church with the moon behind it or a well with an old-fashioned sweep; but Mr. Angell can do a little brook winding about, or just a hill going down, which is really very hard.

Well, we were in the assembly room, a lot of us—we go in for an hour on Thursdays, according as our recitations give us time, no matter about the large or small girls—and he bent over to correct one of the girl’s work. She was drawing a banana, and it looked more like a birch-bark canoe than anything else—it was Mary Watterson—and one of the buttons burst off his vest and rolled on the floor. Of course we laughed, and he blushed and ran after it and said, “Excuse me, young ladies; I beg your pardon, I’m sure. Ah, yes, thank you, Miss West,” and put it in his pocket.

Then he went back to Mary, and he was so embarrassed he drew over the whole banana, and put in shading, too, with a stump!

“You see, young ladies,” he said pretty soon, “a poor bachelor has a great many troubles, and not the least one is his buttons—I beg your pardon, are his buttons!”

I looked at Connie and she caught my