Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/216

 old, old house of Queen Anne's war, of the Revolution and John Adams' administration and of Antietam, the house with the sundial over the door, the old picket gate and his mother in the garden.

To be of account, in Mr. Clarke's mind, a person had to come from a home. Not from a home like his; for even he would not expect that and, Joan Daisy suspected, he would not quite like it if every one had a home like his; for his went back to Queen Anne's war.

Joan Daisy knew about Queen Anne's war, now; she had looked it up; so she knew how impossible it was for many people to possess such a home. But a person to be trustworthy—to Mr. Clarke's mind—must have a house somewhere, and certainly at least a father who could confidently be named and a little land to give one's mother a garden.

Well—and hereupon Joan Daisy energetically finished making her bed—a person could be as good as any one else and have none of those things. She would show Mr. Calvin Clarke, of Clarke's Ferry, Massachusetts, that a boy could come out of a barber-shop with a manicurist for a mother and no father at all and make himself a great musician like Mozart, instead of a murderer; and she would show him that a girl could get from Chicago, from the street, from hotels and flats, from newspapers telling about great people, from motion pictures of things everywhere, from the radio, even from the fronts of buiidings which spell in stone——the idea and determination to be decent and to try to do something, if Dads did come home dizzy every night and mamma doped herself to sleep and the three of them never had inhabited the same place for as long as two months, until Elmen took supervision of the family affairs.

Joan Daisy felt invigorated; she splashed her cheeks