She looked into her basket and fingered its flowers. "That's what he
asked me to call him."
I stiffened up as though I heard a thief picking the lock of my lawful
treasure. She threw me, side wise, a bantering smile and then a more
winsome glance, but I refused to see either. I burned with so many
feelings at once that I could no more have told them than I could have
raised a tune. "Don't you like him?" she asked, and tried to be
very arch.
"Like whom?"
"You know perfectly well," she replied.
"No, I do not like him. Do you?"
"Why,--yes,--I do. I--I thought everybody did." She averted her face and
toyed with the sweet-pea vines. Suddenly she gulped, faced me, blinked
rapidly, and said "If I oughtn't to call him--that,--then I oughtn't to
have called--" she dropped her eyes and bit her lip.
"_That_," I replied, "is a very different matter! At least I had hoped
it was!"
Her rejoinder came in a low, grieved monotone: "Did you say _had_
hoped?"
It was the sweetest question my ear had ever caught, and I asked her, I
scarce know how, if I might still say "do hope".
"Why, I--I didn't know you ever did say it. I don't see that I have any
right to forbid you saying things--to--to yourself."
So we played the game--oldest game on earth--and loveliest. Bungling
moves we made, as you see, and sometimes did not know whose move it was.
At length she admitted that this _is_ a very unsafe world in which to be
kind to soldiers. I told how _fickle_ some of them were. She would not
say she would--or wouldn't--make my case a permanent exception or a
solitary one; yet with me she blissfully pooh-poohed the idea that our
acquaintance was new, she being so wonderfully like my mother, and I
being so wonderfully ditto, ditto. And when I burst into a blazing
eulogy of my mother, my listener gave me kinder looks than I ever
deserved of any woman alive. On my trying to reciprocate, she asked me
for more flowers and hurried back to our earlier theme.
"And really, you know, they say she's almost as truly a scout as Ned
Fer'--as Lieutenant Ferry-Durand. She's from New Orleans, you know, and
she's like us, half-Creole; but her other half is Highland Scotch--isn't
that romantic! When she told us about it she laughed and said it
explained some things in her which nothing else could excuse! Wasn't
that funny!--oh, pshaw! it doesn't sound a bit funny as I tell it, but
she said it in such a droll way! She was so full of fun and frolic that
day! You can't conceive how full of them she is--sometimes; how soberly
she _can_ say the funniest things, and how _funnily_ she can say the
soberest things!"
[Illustration: "Don't you like him?" she asked, and tried to be very
arch.]
"You say she was so full of fun that day; what day?"
The young thing gaped at me, gasped, and melted half to the ground:
"O--oh--I've let it out!"
"Yes, you may as well go right on, now."
She straightened to her toes, covered her open mouth an instant, and
then said "Yes, we knew her--at our house--in New Orleans--poor New
Orleans! Your mother--oh, your splendid, lovely little mother is such a
brave Confederate!"
"My mother brought her to your house?"
"Yes, oh, yes! and that's why it isn't wrong to tell _you_. Charlotte's
been three times through the lines, to and from the city; once by way of
Natchez and twice through Baton Rouge. And oh, the things she's brought
out to our poor boys in the hospitals!"
"Generals' uniforms, for example?"
"Oh, now you're real mean! No! what she's brought the most of is--guess!
You'll never guess it in the world!"
"Hindoo grammars!--No? Well, then,--perfumery!"
"Ah, you! No, I'll tell you." She spoke prudently; I had to bow my ear
so close that it tingled: "Dolls!"
My amazement was genuine. "For our sick soldiers!" I sighed.
Her eyes danced; she leaned away and nodded. Then she drew nearer than
before: "Dolls!" she murmured again;--"and pincushions!--and
emeries!--and 'rats'! you know, for ladies' hair--and chignon-cushions!"
"For our sick soldiers!"
"Yes!--stuffed with quinine!" She laughed in her handkerchief till the
smell of the sweet-peas was lost in the odor of frangipani, and she
staggered almost into my arms. But that sobered her. "And when we speak
of the risk she runs of being sent to Ship Island she laughs and says,
'Life is strife.' She says she'd like it long, but she's got to have
it broad."
"Life is strife indeed to her," I said.
"Oh! do you know that too?--and another reason she gives for taking
those awful risks is that 'it's the best use she can make of her silly
streak'--as if she had any such thing!"
"Why did my mother bring her to you?"
"Oh! she had letters from uncle to aunt Martha! He thinks she's
wonderful!"
"Does your father think so, too?"
"My father? no; but he's prejudiced! That's one of the things I can
never understand--why nearly all the girls I know have such
prejudiced fathers."