One evening in particular Athalie remembered. She had been running her
legs off playing hounds-and-hares across country from the salt-hay
stacks to the chestnut ridge, and she had come in after sunset to find
her mother sewing in her own bedroom, her brother and sisters studying
their lessons in the sitting-room where her father also sat reading
the local evening paper.
Supper was over, but Athalie went to the kitchen and presently
returned to her mother's room carrying a bowl of bread and milk and
half a pie.
Here on the faded carpet at her mother's feet, full in the lamplight
she sat her down and ate in hungry silence while her mother sewed.
Athalie seldom studied. A glance at her books seemed to be enough for
her. And she passed examinations without effort under circumstances
where plodders would have courted disaster.
Rare questions from her mother, brief replies marked the meal. When
she had satisfied her hunger she jumped up, ran downstairs with the
empty dishes, and came slowly back again,--a slender, supple figure
with tangled hair curling below her shoulders, dirty shirt-waist,
soiled features and hands, and the ragged blue skirt of a sailor suit
hanging to her knees.
"Your other sailor suit is washed and mended," said her mother,
smiling at her child in tatters.
Athalie, her gaze remote, nodded absently. After a moment she lifted
her steady dark blue eyes: "A boy kissed me, mamma," she remarked, dropping cross-legged at her
mother's feet.
"Don't kiss strange boys," said her mother quietly.
"I didn't. But why not?"
"It is not considered proper."
"Why?"
Her mother said: "Kissing is a common and vulgar practice except in
the intimacy of one's own family."
"I thought so," nodded Athalie; "I soaked him for doing it."
"Who was he?"
"Oh, it was that fresh Harry Eldon. I told him if he ever tried to get
fresh with me again I'd kill him.... Mamma?"
"Yes?"
"All that about poor old Mr. Manners isn't true, is it?"
Her mother smiled. The children had been taught to leave a morsel on
their plates "for manners"; and to impress it upon them their mother
had invented a story about a poor old man named Manners who depended
upon what they left, and who crept in to eat it after they had retired
from table.
So leaving something "for Manners" had been thoroughly and
successfully inculcated, until the habit was formed. And now Athalie
was the last of the children to discover the gentle fraud practised
upon her.