Alice Adams--Booth Tarkington [37]
Alice would have gone out softly, but without opening his eyes, he spoke to her: "Don't go, dearie. Come sit with the old man a little while."
She brought a chair near his. "I thought you were napping."
"No. I don't hardly ever do that. I just drift a little sometimes."
"How do you mean you drift, papa?"
He looked at her vaguely. "Oh, I don't know. Kind of pictures. They get a little mixed up--old times with times still ahead, like planning what to do, you know. That's as near a nap as I get-- when the pictures mix up some. I suppose it's sort of drowsing."
She took one of his hands and stroked it. "What do you mean when you say you have pictures like 'planning what to do'?" she asked.
"I mean planning what to do when I get out and able to go to work again."
"But that doesn't need any planning," Alice said, quickly. "You're going back to your old place at Lamb's, of course."
Adams closed his eyes again, sighing heavily, but made no other response.
"Why, of COURSE you are!" she cried. "What are you talking about?"
His head turned slowly toward her, revealing the eyes, open in a haggard stare. "I heard you the other night when you came from the party," he said. "I know what was the matter."
"Indeed, you don't," she assured him. "You don't know anything about it, because there wasn't anything the matter at all."
"Don't you suppose I heard you crying? What'd you cry for if there wasn't anything the matter?"
"Just nerves, papa. It wasn't anything else in the world."
"Never mind," he said. "Your mother told me."
"She promised me not to!"
At that Adams laughed mournfully. "It wouldn't be very likely I'd hear you so upset and not ask about it, even if she didn't come and tell me on her own hook. You needn't try to fool me; I tell you I know what was the matter."
"The only matter was I had a silly fit," Alice protested. "It did me good, too."
"How's that?"
"Because I've decided to do something about it, papa."
"That isn't the way your mother looks at it," Adams said, ruefully. "She thinks it's our place to do something about it. Well, I don't know--I don't know; everything seems so changed these days. You've always been a good daughter, Alice, and you ought to have as much as any of these girls you go with; she's convinced me she's right about THAT. The trouble is----" He faltered, apologetically, then went on, "I mean the question is--how to get it for you."
"No!" she cried. "I had no business to make such a fuss just because a lot of idiots didn't break their necks to get dances with me and because I got mortified about Walter--Walter WAS pretty terrible----"
"Oh, me, my!" Adams lamented. "I guess that's something we just have to leave work out itself. What you going to do with a boy nineteen or twenty years old that makes his own living? Can't whip him. Can't keep him locked up in the house. Just got to hope he'll learn better, I suppose."
"Of course he didn't want to go to the Palmers'," Alice explained, tolerantly--"and as mama and I made him take me, and he thought that was pretty selfish in me, why, he felt he had a right to amuse himself any way he could. Of course it was awful that this--that this Mr. Russell should----" In spite of her, the recollection choked her.
"Yes, it was awful," Adams agreed. "Just awful. Oh, me, my!"
But Alice recovered herself at once, and showed him a cheerful face. "Well, just a few years from now I probably won't even remember it! I believe hardly anything amounts to as much as we think it does at the time."
"Well--sometimes it don't."
"What I've been thinking, papa: it seems to me I ought to