CHAPTER IX THE CURE FOR QUARRELS

As if to make positive that she intended to do exactly as she pleased, especially if the doing of it were opposed by the anxious Margot, Rosa rushed to dress.

“I’ve been in long enough,” she assured Nancy, “I’d die if I were cooped up here any longer. I phoned Gar, told him the doctor said I had to go out—”

“Rosa!” Nancy’s manner showed more disappointment than shock.

“Now, Nannily, don’t go getting excited. My ankle wasn’t bad, really. It was just fun to have a lot of attention. You have no idea how precious little of it I get, usually.”

Nancy sighed. Her own vivid personality felt eclipsed beside the turbulent, changeable cousin. She, Nancy, simply had to be polite and accept things as Rosa offered them, but100 with each new turn she found herself more and more baffled. Even if she were company and had to appear pleased with things, she was feeling rather tired of Rosa’s whims. They weren’t funny at all; not half so funny as just anything that Ted would do. But why think of Ted now? He was having a fine time with boys at a boys’ camp, and Nancy was wishing she had gone to a girls’ camp with Ruth Ashley.

“What are you going to put on?” asked Rosa very casually, too casually to be taken as Rosa tried to make it.

“I’m not going to change,” replied Nancy. “I’m not going out.”

“Not going out!” exclaimed Rosa, as if such a contingency had never occurred to her. “Why, Nancy I’m going.”

“Go ahead,” said Nancy. This was casual.

“But I want you to come,” Rosa’s voice was a key higher.

“Sorry, but I don’t want to go.”

Following that surprising statement Rosa rushed around, tossing helpless garments from101 one end of the room to another, as if taking her spite out on them. She wasn’t saying a word to Nancy; Nancy wasn’t saying a word to her.

Presently Margot came in for the trays, and as she gathered things up she made known her disapproval of Rosa’s conduct.

“I don’t like to scold, Rosalind, when your cousin has just come, and your father is leaving—”

“Oh, go ahead and scold, Maggie,” said Rosa impertinently. “Get it out of your system. Your eyes look bulgy and—”

“Rosalind! I will not take any impudence. You know that,” replied Margot quite properly. “You may be too big to be put in a corner, but you would miss your allowance, and I’ve got to have some control of you if I am to be responsible for your welfare.”

At this threat, that her allowance would be withheld if she did not do better, Rosa quieted down—some. She stopped throwing things around but she did not speak to Nancy. Neither did Nancy speak to her. In fact, she felt like doing almost anything else, for her102 vacation was being spoiled just because Rosa was so obstinate.

If only she hadn’t come! If only she had gone with patient little Miss Manners, who loved her. Certainly Rosa couldn’t care anything about her and treat her this way.

Once Nancy started on this line of reasoning the inevitable was bound to happen. In feeling sorry for herself she was going to become homesick!

“I should think you would be ashamed—” began Margot, but Rosa checked her.

“I am, if that’s any good to know. I’m always ashamed, but you don’t have to make it worse, Margot.”

Nancy glanced over at Rosa, who was doing what she usually did in dressing: trying to make her waist line look smaller by actually making it look larger. She was pulling a girdle in so tight that the rebellious little bunches of flesh pouched out in pudgy pockets above and below.

She was ashamed—of being too fat! As Nancy realized this her resentment cooled.103 She did love Rosalind and perhaps Rosalind loved her. Just because Rosa was too stout and not wise enough to understand that such a thing has little, if anything, to do with personality, her young life was being embittered. She imagined that every one slighted her; that every one laughed at her; that every one was making fun of her. Whereas, she was only a growing girl with her growth unbalanced.

The dark blue dress that Rosa was adjusting might have been a school uniform in the severity of its lines; but Rosa had declared she could only wear dark colors; that Orilla had told her so.

The longer both girls held silence against each other, the harder it was going to be to break it. Nancy was not ungenerous, but she was human, and no girl wants to “give in” when she feels herself to have been the one injured. Margot noticed this set expression, and the girls’ lack of conversation. Also, she noticed Nancy biting her lip.

“Not quarreling with your cousin, I hope, Rosalind,” said the woman severely. “I do104 believe I shall have to have a talk with your father.”

“He’d love it,” scoffed Rosa, saucily.

“Very well,” said Margot with finality, “I shall.”

The butler had been in twice for the trays and now everything was cleared away. Rosa was dressed, hatted and coated, and she was only pretending to fuss with her hair. Nancy jumped up and with a hasty “I’m going to read, Rosa,” flew into her own room.

She knew this would make matters worse; that the only time to stop a quarrel is before it starts, but Nancy was not equal, just then, to reasonable arguments. All she could see, feel or know, was that she wished she were almost any place else than at Fernlode.

Being away from home, visiting and having things unpleasant! It was so easy to bring tears to her eyes now, and she so rarely cried at home. She just had to choke back the tears that were forcing themselves up her throat and trying to reach her eyes.

Why should she have been made so miserable?105 Why was Rosa so unreasonable? What if she was fat, wasn’t Nancy thin? Didn’t her friends always call her “skinny” and she hadn’t even bothered about it any more than she had fussed over the “Nincy-niney-nanny-notey in a red petticoaty,” Ted’s fighting chant or battle cry, as their mother always termed his childish taunt.

Rosa was going downstairs—Nancy heard her grumbling as she went, and it seemed Margot had carried out her threat, for Rosa was talking back and scoffing at the commands evidently sent by her father.

“Serves her right!” was Nancy’s first impulsive criticism. Then again came the thought of Ted. How she and he would quarrel, how she would declare she hoped her mother would do all sorts of things to him (which, of course, she never did), and then in the end, just as Ted was realizing that something in the way of discipline might possibly be visited upon him, Nancy would always relent. She would even step between him and the impending evil.

106 That was exactly how she felt now. After all, Rosa was such a baby. She hadn’t learned from contact with companions, for, according to her own story, she had never had a real chum.

“Ted, Ted, Ted!” kept persistingly challenging Nancy, until she knew she would have to do something for Rosa. It was not being generous, really, it was just doing what she had been brought up to do—to be brave enough to be humble.

She flew to her mirror and daubbed at her eyes; they looked rather puckery. Then she flirted her powder puff around her nose, that looked decidedly shiny.

“Wish I had put on my red dress,” she told her reflection in the glass, “but there’s no time now. If I run along with Rosa, surely Uncle Frederic won’t scold her.”

On the broad stair landing, where the big brass lanterns and the lovely soft palms opened the way into the living room, she found the surprised Rosa.

“Why, Nancy!” she exclaimed. “I thought—”

107 “But I don’t care for that book,” said Nancy evasively. “Where are you going?”

“Horrid old Margot—”

“Hush! Let’s make believe we’re—where’s Dell? I thought she was here.”

“Gone. She was here. Dad said I couldn’t go out. They’re going to the park—” Rosa’s voice was full of rancor.

“Can’t we go out in the cove in your flat-bottom boat? I love to row, and it’s safe in the cove, isn’t it?” asked Nancy, glad to think of a reasonable plan.

“Too safe. Like swimming doll ducks in the bath tub. But we’ll go. I’ll ask dad. He—has—summoned me—”

Just then, down the long hall strode the gentleman in question. He was waving a paper at Nancy.

“A letter for you, Antoinette,” he announced gaily. “A steamer letter from your mother—”

“Oh, goody!” exclaimed Nancy happily. “Come on, Rosa. Let’s read it.”

“But dad wants to see me—”

108 “Oh, never mind, Boots,” he replied, just giving the willful one a playful shake. “Give dad a kiss and promise—promise to be good.”

Whereat Rosa actually sprang upon the foot with the injured ankle, hugging her father so impulsively that Nancy instantly decided she was just like Ted.

Is there anything lovelier than the calm after the storm? Arm in arm Rosa and Nancy sauntered off, their happy laughter ringing through old Fernlode, their voices blending in genuine affection until reaching the water’s edge, Rosa showed Nancy how she “megaphoned” down the lake to No Man’s Land, a little island, desolate and alone. Nancy did the phoning by cupping her hands and shouting in the weird way that always provokes an echo.

“Ted was such a funny little fellow when he was very small,” Nancy told her cousin. “He used to say he loved to go under bridges, where he could hear his voice after he was finished with it.”

“Finished with it?” queried Rosa.

109 “Yes; that’s the way he used to describe an echo.”

“Oh, how funny!” yelled Rosa. “Let’s give a couple of echoes for Ted.”

They shouted again and again, until the echoes became a mere jumble of sounds.

“I must read Mumsey’s letter,” insisted Nancy presently. “Just let’s sit in the boat and—read it.”

The steamer letter proved the treat it was bound to be, Nancy hugging every word, every syllable, while Rosa leaned over, fascinated.

“Your mother is—wonderful, Nan,” she said finally. “No wonder you—you’ve got so much sense.”

“Have I?” asked Nancy, unwilling to take that sort of compliment. “No one, not any of my friends, ever say things like that to me; I’m so flighty,” she admitted quite frankly.

“But you’re not scrappy like I am,” spoke Rosa. “I just wonder why I love to—oppose folks.” This little sentence sounded tragic from Rosa’s lips. Her round, dimpily face110 fell into serious lines as she expressed this query, and even her baby-blue eyes looked far away where they could see nothing.

“You’re not scrappy,” Nancy felt bound to defend. “Maybe you just imagine folks are opposing you,” she hazarded.

“I know they are,” insisted Rosa sadly.