Mama said she like to made her drop, dead for a second. “Here you had this marvelous blonde child and never so much as wrote your mother a word about it,” says Mama. “I’m thoroughly ashamed of you.” But of course she wasn’t.

Stella-Rondo just calmly takes off this hat, I wish you could see it. She says, “Why, Mama, Shirley-T.’s adopted, I can prove it.”

“How?” says Mama, but all I says was, “H’m!” There I was over the hot stove, trying to stretch two chickens over five people and a completely unexpected child into the bargain, without one moment’s notice.

“What do you mean—‘H’m!’?” says Stella-Rondo, and Mama says, “I heard that, Sister.”

I said that oh, I didn’t mean a thing, only that whoever Shirley-T. was, she was the spit-image of Papa-Daddy if he’d cut off his beard, which of course he’d never do in the world. Papa-Daddy’s Mama’s papa and sulks.

Stella-Rondo got furious! She said, “Sister, I don’t need to tell you you got a lot of nerve and always did have and I’ll thank you to make no future reference to my adopted child whatsoever.”

“Very well,” I said. “Very well, very well. Of course I noticed at once she looks like Mr. Whitaker’s side too. That frown. She looks like a cross between Mr. Whitaker and Papa-Daddy.”

“Well, all I can say is she isn’t.”

“She looks exactly like Shirley Temple to me,” says Mama, but Shirley-T. just ran away from her. So the first thing Stella-Rondo did at the table was turn Papa-Daddy against me.

“Papa-Daddy,” she says. He was trying to cut up his meat. “Papa-Daddy!” I was taken completely by surprise. Papa-Daddy is about a million years old and’s got this long-long beard. “Papa-Daddy, Sister says she fails to understand why you don’t cut off your beard.”

So Papa-Daddy l-a-y-s down his knife and fork! He’s real rich. Mama says he is, he says he isn’t. So he says, “Have I heard correctly? You don’t understand why I don’t cut off my beard?”

“Why,” I says, “Papa-Daddy, of course I understand, I did not say any such of a thing, the idea!”

He says, “Hussy!”

I says, “Papa-Daddy, you know I wouldn’t any more want you to cut off your beard than the man in the moon. It was the farthest thing from my mind! Stella-Rondo sat there and made that up while she was eating breast of chicken.”

But he says, “So the postmistress fails to understand why I don’t cut off my beard. Which job I got you through my influence with the government. ‘Bird’s nest’—is that what you call it?”

Not that it isn’t the next to smallest P.O. in the entire state of Mississippi.