Little Miss By-The-Day | Page 4

me peer into the narrow hall room, "there--see--"
Ah! that bare little room! So tidy! With faded discolored wall paper and a scrubbed pine floor! With its battered iron bed! There's an old table by the one window with a child's silver mug and plate and spoon on it, each of them with a great bee carved upon it. That's all there is in that room save a low chair and a superb but shabby walnut bureau.
"She loved it so much that she wouldn't change it when she was building Octavia House over--"
"Octavia House!" I cried. "Why, that's that queer house where all the young geniuses live! The one that the Peter Alden money built--"
"It's not a queer house!" the girl defied me. "It's--it's this house! And you can't say Money built this house! Money couldn't have done it! Not all the money in the world, couldn't! It wasn't Money! It was-- Pride! Not the sort of pride that goeth before _de_struction but that mightier pride that goeth before _con_struction! No, no!" she murmured vehemently, "it wasn't Money! It was really almost done before the money came! And she didn't just build the house over, she built all of us over. And built the whole world over for us all. Just with her pride in us! Just with the pride she made us feel in ourselves! And do you know, we were all such self-centered idiots, that it wasn't until after she was gone that we grasped what she'd done with us? We didn't know the glory and the wonder of her until after she was gone--"
"She's not--?"
The Sculptor Girl answered my half-asked question almost ferociously.
"Of course she's not dead! She is the alivest person in this whole world--aliver than you or I can ever be! And yet,--we've lost her. She isn't just ours any more. And when she was blessedly, absolutely just ours--we didn't appreciate her. You see, she was so frumpy and absurd and quiet we didn't think about her--we scarcely saw her. But oh--the minute when we did see her! It came in a flash for me! I just knew, all of a sudden, that she was perfectly beautiful--as beautiful as her own whistle--her lovely, lovely Mademoiselle Folly whistle--"
"Oh! Oh!" I gasped, "_You can't mean that she was--is--Mademoiselle Folly?_"
"Mean it? Didn't you know it? Didn't you ever hear her whistle? Oh, even now that she's gone it seems to me that I can still hear her whistling! And no matter what any one has said about it--they couldn't all of them, put together, say half enough--not even if they all said things as gushy as the Poetry Girl--she said it was like water trickling in a moonlit fountain! I only know it's like what I tried to put into my little Pandora--that it was like what Barrie was thinking when he let Peter Pan cry, 'I'm Joy! Joy! Joy!'--Even the Painter Boy, who has a silly pose that he hates music, used to hang around to hear her whistle--he pretended he was just looking at her so's he could paint her, but that didn't fool me--Listen, there's Nor' stumping up stairs now--he's awfully lame on these rainy days and that moody--"
"Do you mean Noralla? The one who did 'The Spirit of Romance'? Does he live here?"
She nodded impishly.
"And Thad, the cartoonist and Blythe Modder and--" she began reeling off a victorious list of young celebrities.
"And that one little dressmaker discovered you all?" I asked, quite awestricken, "How could she? What sort of a wonder was she? How can you explain it?"
The girl swung her lithe self up on the table, clasped her narrow hands about her knees and smiled benignly down upon me. She seemed naively content with herself, relaxed and quiet after her tempestuous storm of words.
"You can't explain it, you just accept it--just as you accept sunshine and rain--you can't explain any more than you can describe. And she's the sort of woman that all of us who dwell within this house will go on all the rest of our lives trying to describe and I'll bet that not all of us put together can tell more'n half that there is to tell about her. Why, her very faults are different than other people's faults! She has a pippin of a temper and such stub-stub-stubborn ways! Don't you think Thad's cartoons of 'Temperamental Therese' are peaches? Well, they are nothing but Felice in her illogical crotchety unfair minutes--Thad says the only way to explain such heavenly rudeness as Felicia's is to remember that she began being rude in 1817--"
"How old is she?" I fairly shouted, "Oh, please get down to earth and tell me something definite about her! You're perfectly maddening!"
The girl jumped lightly to the floor and slipped across the room to swing the casement