“He’ll pay it back, don’t you worry about that,” Bonnie said firmly. “You children ought to be ashamed criticizing your father. Why, your father is one of the finest, loveliest men that ever breathed.”

“What will Mr. Purdy do with us if Papa doesn’t pay the bill?” Marcia asked.

Bonnie merely tousled both girls’ heads, and looked fondly down at them.

“You poor kids worrying that way!” she exclaimed. “But don’t you go worrying your papa about things! He’s got enough on his mind, three motherless children, nobody but strangers willing to look after them, poor man!”

As usual Lena’s pride was roused.

“We have plenty of relations, we don’t have to have strangers,” she said with a toss of her head. “We’ve got Chris and Isobel and Uncle Louie and Grandpa Willard, and plenty other relations.”

“They never come to see us,” said Marcia candidly. “When Papa wrote we were coming to visit them they never answered.”

“They were just afraid they’d have you on their hands for good,” Bonnie suggested. “It costs money to bring up three children, and they maybe weren’t sure they could afford you.”

“But we only wanted to visit them,” Marcia said. “Papa told them.”

“I guess they didn’t believe him,” Lena said.

Bonnie shook her finger at them.

“Not another word about your father, now! Lena, don’t you listen to that bad Mary Evelyn. Your father’s doing the best he can; he’s a wonderful man and don’t you forget it.”

Lena was as pleased as the others to have this reassurance. She punished Mary Evelyn by staying home and allowing Marcia to spend her ten cents on nougats which they ate playing cassino on the floor.

18

IT ASTONISHED MARCIA to discover that other children lived in an almost incomprehensibly different way than they did. It took a long time for this fact to penetrate, since she spent very little time with her schoolmates. They played silly games at recess, like Water, Water Wildflower, and Crack the Whip, all involving a lot of running and whooping around, when the time could be spent in the school library, reading books not recommended, or studying words in the big dictionary. Lena always walked home with Mary Evelyn and an older new friend, Myrtle Chase, who had just moved to town from Detroit and was an object of worship to Lena and Mary Evelyn. Marcia walked home alone, carrying on imaginary conversations with characters in the books she was reading. The other children had birthday parties, which filled Marcia with vague dread, for everybody else knew what to do and, besides, she never had any presents to give. They had peanut races, and the mothers told them what games to play, and to save their favors for “memory books,” whatever they might be. These children had pretty little bedrooms, doll houses, little pianos, all kinds of storybooks, and sometimes they had bicycles or ponies or rabbits in the backyard. They lived on Park Square, far from the railroad center of town, or on Main Boulevard; they took dancing lessons every Saturday from a Miss Brumby, and music lessons, violin or piano, from a Miss Cory from Oberlin. Their fathers were at home all the time and owned a grocery store, a real estate business, a hardware store, or were executives in the furniture factory, the banks, or the telephone company. At the parties something awful usually happened. The mother would ask Marcia where was her “hankie,” and, finding she had none, would take her upstairs to lend her one. Or she would exclaim, gently, “Little girl, is that a nice way to eat? Just look at your frock—or was that stain on it before?” Dishes broke as soon as they reached Marcia’s hands. Some adult would usually draw her out of the group to say, “That’s not nice language for a little girl,” with Marcia sulkily uncertain of what word had been wrong, only knowing that the kitchen help and the lobby gentlemen at the hotel always chuckled when she said it.