“It just goes to show,” Bonnie, weeping, explained. “A person does the best she knows how but all the good it does! A person could eat her heart out for a kind word for all some people care!”

“My papa likes you, Bonnie,” Florrie volunteered one day.

“Your papa hates the ground I walk on,” she stated darkly. “You can tell him I said so.”

Mr. Hartwell came over often, sometimes with his lady-friend Mabel. On these occasions Papa borrowed a screen from Mr. Purdy to place around the children’s bed, while he acted host to his two guests and Bonnie when she got off duty. Mabel was definitely stout, “a fine figure,” as Papa declared, with tightly curled bangs and yellow hair, a pink-and-white face, and two gold teeth. She had been Mr. Hartwell’s lady-friend for ten years, and was still half-dazzled and half-resentful of his hold on her, so that she divided her time between rumpling his glossy hair in her two plump little fists and cooing, “Whose honey sugar are you?” and next minute snapping, “Oh, shut your big mouth, you big fourflusher. I said Shut Up.” Mr. Hartwell usually remained polite toward her during both these treatments, since, as he often said, he had too big a respect for a real lady like Miss Purdy and his friend Willard to kick her rump right through her shoulder blades as many less cultivated men might do on similar provocation.

A card table was set up during these gay evenings and Five Hundred enjoyed with a pitcher of beer, pretzels, and cheese. Papa kidded Bonnie about all her beaux and treated Mabel with the cagey respect due a pal’s lady-friend. Sometimes he played the guitar for Bonnie to recite or sing, but often in the very middle he would stop abruptly and put the guitar away. “I guess it reminds him of Mama,” deduced Marcia and Lena, in bed listening but pretending for their own purposes to be asleep.

Mabel slept in Bonnie’s room on these occasions, and Mr. Hartwell tucked in the other brass bed with Papa. They snored and filled the room with fumes of cigar smoke and beer. In the night Florrie always stumbled into her father’s bed. Mr. Hartwell and Papa were usually waked up by Florrie putting her feet in their faces or butting them in the stomachs in her restless tossing. These were good times, the children thought, being part of Papa’s life, but after his parties he was silent and moody. Bonnie was always finding some reason to call when he was home, but he never seemed glad to see her when no one else was around.

“How’s Mr. Willard today?” Bonnie asked gayly. “I don’t suppose any power on earth would make him take a poor girl to the Elks’ dance in Lesterville tonight.”

“An old family man like me’s got no business at a dance,” Papa answered. “All I can do to get around on crutches as it is.”