Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/76

Rh or three times a week at least for the purpose.

I was returning, I met and recognized by their red dresses the two little Arnold girls, both of whom stuck their small noses pertly into the air at sight of a stranger, and went by me with the most impudent expressions on their faces. Had they been mine, I would have spanked them soundly for their insolence, but from what Portia had written me I felt sure their mother would commend them for having shown their "high spirits". I must add that I was so astonished at the behavior of the two children who at ten and twelve years should have known better, that I actually turned around as they passed me, distrusting my own eyes, and Minna stuck out her red tongue at me with considerable gusto.

I have always been rather glad that I did not feel anything but an itching desire to spank Minna, or I might have been conscience-stricken later on. But again, I'm getting ahead of my story. It is hard to get everything into its proper sequence, when one is looking back and can understand things that at the time seemed out of place and inexplicable.

I walked briskly back to the house without any other experiences, rang the bell, and was admitted by Fu Sing, who bowed and scraped his way backward as I entered. He informed me in his heathen dialect that "Missee" was in the "Libelly", which information I was unable to understand until my own inclinations drove me to resort to Mr. Differdale's books, there being really nothing else for me to do except read. There I found my niece lying comfortably among her silken cushions, absorbed in a black-covered volume with queer-looking circles and triangles on the cover.

She glanced up as I came in, and closed the book.

"Did you enjoy your marketing expedition? I so dislike running into Mrs. Differdale or Aurora, or those two insufferable children, that I'm coward enough to resort to the telephone," she observed lazily.

I tried to let myself down gracefully on to the cushions, and failed dismally.

"I've simply got to make some loose, flowing robes like yours, Portia," said I.

"They're ever so much more comfortable than ordinary clothes, Auntie," said my niece dreamily.

Just then I suddenly took note of a detail that had escaped my attention. It had been so becoming, and it seemed so natural to me, that I hadn't noticed it. Portia's negligee or whatever you could call it was not black nor did it have a touch of crape about it: instead, it was some kind of shimmering orchid shade over a metallic and shiny green, not mourning at all.

"Why, Portia!" I exclaimed. "You're not dressing in mourning, are you, my dear?"

She looked down at her flowing garments, regarded them quietly for a moment, then raised her eyes to mine.

"I don't believe in putting on black, Auntie, and neither did Mr. Differdale." (I realized then for the first time. that she had never called him by his first name to me.) "I do put it on to go out around Meadowlawn, for the sake of his mother and sister, who would believe otherwise that I was not showing the proper respect to his memory. I do not wish anyone to think that I am not respecting sufficiently the memory of that splendid man—but here—in the privacy of my own home, may I not relax sufficiently to permit myself the relief of this color, instead of wearing depressing black?"

"What do you wear at night, when you exercise Boris and Andrei?" I inquired. Boris and Andrei were the wolfhounds to whom I had been