CHAPTER VII LOVELY LADY BETTY

It seems the ankle was not sprained after all. Rosa spent one day trying on all her sick-spell caps, the little gifts she had not yet had a chance to wear, trying on her fancy silk robes—there was that beauty, Betty had brought her from Paris, it was glorious and she had never really worn it before.

Nancy never before had seen such beautiful things, and Rosa insisted that she too try some of them on. It was in this way the cousin tactfully bestowed upon Nancy a lot of pretty things “just presents I should have sent on Christmas and on birthdays,” insisted Rosa.

“But wait until Dad and Betty come,” threatened Rosa. “They’ll want me all put in splints, see if they don’t. Betty seems to think I’ll melt, like gelatine, if I’m left out of76 the ice-box,” she finished, a little bitterly.

“Now, Rosa,” objected Nancy, “maybe you’re not fair. I can guess that Betty feels like your mother, even if she isn’t, and that would make her worry a lot more about you. Since I’ve been away from my mother I know what a lot of things she has been doing for me, in spite of keeping up her library business. My clothes seem to be all upset already—”

“Give them to Margot, she adores fixing clothes,” interrupted Rosa, losing the point Nancy had tried to make regarding the pretty step-mother. “I honestly do believe she musses my things up just for the joy of straightening them out again.”

“How funny! But I don’t really mean that I can’t look after my things, Rosa,” explained Nancy, “although I did use to think no girl in the world could hate such work more than I did—”

“I don’t mind it a bit,” interrupted Rosa grandly. “I often wash out laces and my fine stockings—”

“Oh,” said Nancy with one of her twisted77 smiles, “I don’t mind just that, either. But Rosa, hadn’t you better get off that foot? You’ve been standing on it for almost half an hour.”

“Just as you say, Coz,” agreed Rosa, who did seem strangely willing to agree with most of Nancy’s suggestions. “You don’t know what this ankle means to me. I haven’t told you—”

“What?” asked Nancy, bluntly.

“Oh, something—great!” and the baby blue eyes fairly whirled around in Rosa’s face as she turned them up, down, from right to left and then the other way, expressing the wonderment she had so vaguely hinted at.

“Think you might tell me,” teased Nancy. In fact the big secret between Rosa and Orilla was growing more and more mystifying to the visitor.

“I do intend to tell you, of course, Nancy,” confided Rosa, her face falling into the rarely serious lines which this subject could provoke. “But not just—yet.” She drawled these last words intentionally and the refusal to answer78 her question piqued Nancy. In fact, she dropped Rosa’s prettiest scarf down in a heap without even pretending to fold it.

“Mad?” teased Rosa.

“No, of course not. But Rosa, it is queer, the way you act about that girl.” She just couldn’t say Orilla.

“Nan-cee.” Rosa had both her arms around the pouting cousin. “You’re not jealous! You see—oh, you see I haven’t had any body else; not anybody, and Orilla has been kind to me—”

“Even Gar doesn’t like her,” flung back Nancy.

“No, that’s so. He hates her. But then you see, I’ve been an awful nuisance to Gar on account of it all.”

“How—a nuisance?”

“Nancy Brandon, you’re what my dad calls an idealist!” exclaimed Rosa, bubbling back into her usual jolly mood. “Know what that is? I’ve looked it up for it’s dad’s pet word. It means one who—”

“Ideals I suppose,” said Nancy, herself79 recovering the good humored mood. “Well, never mind, Rosa. Just so long as you don’t run away any more, or break any more ankles, I won’t mind,” and she wound the lately despised scarf around Rosa’s plump shoulders, with great affectation.

It was turning out to be a rainy day, so that the girls’ enforced idleness was not a real hardship. They were having a splendid time, especially Nancy, who, being just a normal girl, delighted in seeing beautiful clothes. And Rosa did have them—stacks of them. Not only was she the possessor of gowns by the dozen, but the finest of silk underthings, some of them so cob-webby that Nancy frankly questioned their utility.

“Please don’t give me anything else, Rosa,” she pleaded. “I shan’t know what to do with such finery.”

“Don’t worry, love,” replied Rosa. “Nobody knows exactly what to do with them until they’ve been worn a time or two. That’s dad’s joke about the man’s boots, you know. He couldn’t get them on until after he had80 worn them a time or two!”

“Pretty good!” agreed Nancy. “I’ll remember that. But Rosa—oh, here comes the car!”

“With Betty and dad. Let me get into bed. I must look sick enough to ward off a scolding!”

She dropped such bits of clothing as she had been draping herself in, and scuttled into bed. Nancy felt quite nervous enough at the prospect of meeting the pretty Lady Betty, but with Rosa’s condition to be explained, the home-coming seemed rather exciting.

Margot rushed into the bedroom. “Your father is coming, my dear child,” she pronounced, “and Mrs. Betty. Now please don’t get them all worried and anxious—” she paused as she patted the innumerable pillows.

“Get them worried! Indeed! And my poor foot—Hello, Daddy!” called out Rosalind. “My leg’s broke!”

The bombastic greeting was taken up by her daddy who promptly and lustily shouted:

“Hello, Rosalinda! Which leg?”

81 Proudly Rosa stuck the injured member, in its white bandages, outside the bed covering.

“That one! ‘Busted’ badly!” she mocked. “But Daddy, there’s Nancy. She’s scared to death of me, Nancy, come over here—”

Nancy knew Rosa’s father, the handsome Uncle Frederic who had visited them in their own little home, so she was not at all embarrassed in greeting him.

He was as tall and handsome as ever, Nancy could not help noticing, and his welcome to her made her feel almost comfortable—if only she had the meeting of his new wife over with.

“Where’s Betty?” asked Rosa, rather quietly when her father had taken his place beside her bed.

“She’ll be along presently. We had rather a tiring drive—the roads are in their usual bad summer condition. But tell me about the accident, Linda? How did it all happen?”

As father and daughter talked, Nancy noticed how particular he was to know as much and more than Rosa seemed anxious to tell.82 He was most solicitous about Rosa’s condition, however, and so affectionate that he called her a different name each time he addressed her, yet he was very positive in his manner. Evidently, he was not too sure of his daughter’s prudence.

“Of course, it’s all right for you to go out to the park with Garfield and Adell,” he said, “but never alone, Rosy-kins, not even with Nancy and in the day-time. Remember, I don’t want to have you lost in the New Hampshire forests, you know.”

Rosa fairly glowed under her father’s interest and affection. Sitting by the window and watching this play, Nancy realized what Rosa’s father meant to her—just what Nancy’s mother meant to Nancy.

“We don’t know until we are away from it,” she reasoned, choking back the wave of home-sickness that threatened to creep over her. “I don’t see why Rosa thinks she is left out of everything; that she is too fat to be happy,” went on Nancy’s deliberation. “Her father just idolizes her.”

83 A little flutter from the doorway seemed to answer that, for presently the lovely Betty—Lady Betty, as Nancy was privately calling the new aunt, appeared before them.

She was lovely; Nancy conceded that instantly, and surrounding her, like a halo of loveliness, was a faint something which recalled to Nancy the perfection of Miss Manners’ hand-made laces—a combination of inspiration and perfectly chosen materials. No wonder her Uncle Frederic had been fascinated by Betty Burnett. Surely she was lovely.

“Sweet-heart!” she almost sang to Rosalind. “What has happened to you? Don’t tell me—”

“Busted me leg!” sang back Rosa, impishly. “But, Betty dear, there’s Nancy. You are going to love her because she—is skinny!”

The next few moments were lost to Nancy in her confusing introduction. Betty was being kind, kind to the point of gush, Nancy feared, but then Rosa had been absurdly blunt and so had sort of challenged their meeting. The explosion of slang betrayed84 Rosa’s own feelings. She was insisting that Betty would love a thin girl and intimating broadly that she hated fat ones.

While all this was going on, and especially a little later when Uncle Frederic had arranged his wife’s blue cushions in the big blue bird chair (Betty was, of course, a dainty blonde), Nancy found her eyes devouring the picture.

This was the wonderful, the beautiful Betty who had taken—so Rosa said—Rosa’s place in the tall iron-gray man’s heart. Who had put Orilla out of what she had been brought up to consider her home, and worst of all, if true, it was she who had brought unhappiness to little Rosa, because her own flawless beauty was contrasting so painfully with the ungraceful lines of Rosalind Fernell.

It must be remembered that Nancy Brandon was a girl whose home influence was almost opposite that of Rosa’s. Her mother and brother Ted were dear, darling chums, all and each a part of the other’s existence. Also, that Nancy’s mother was employed in a public85 library, so that books had become a real part of Nancy’s life. And books are very good friends indeed. They almost always try to make folks more tolerant and more reasonable with their surroundings and companions.

But here was Rosa, a girl who only read books when she had to, or when Margot threatened her with something worse to do. She had had little chance to learn the simple things that stood for so much in Nancy’s life, and while Nancy could not have reasoned this way, it is only fair to understand Rosa and her peculiar self-made troubles.

Lady Betty was not exerting herself very much, in spite of Rosa’s predicament. There had been the tiring drive, as Uncle Frederic had explained, and there was the sea-going voyage to-morrow—as everybody knew.

And Nancy was glad they were going away. Rosa had been positively rebellious ever since the pretty Betty had come into her room. Was it sheer nervousness? Nancy wondered. How perfectly silly for Rosa to keep sticking that bandaged foot outside the lace-edged86 sheet. And how absurd for her to keep using such senseless slang! Calling it a “busted foot” and insisting that she was “laid up for repairs”—it sounded like pure affectation to Nancy, who, while being no prude, was not a rebel, either.