During the days that Mr. Peck had consented to leave Idella with her Annie
took the whole charge of the child, and grew into an intimacy with her
that was very sweet. It was not necessary to this that Idella should be
always tractable and docile, which she was not, but only that she should
be affectionate and dependent; Annie found that she even liked her to be
a little baddish; it gave her something to forgive; and she experienced a
perverse pleasure in discovering that the child of a man so self-forgetful
as Mr. Peck was rather more covetous than most children. It also amused her
that when some of Idella's shabby playmates from Over the Track casually
found their way to the woods past Annie's house, and tried to tempt Idella
to go with them, the child disowned them, and ran into the house from
them; so soon was she alienated from her former life by her present social
advantages. She apparently distinguished between Annie and the Boltons, or
if not quite this, she showed a distinct preference for her company, and
for her part of the house. She hung about Annie with a flattering curiosity
and interest in all she did. She lost every trace of shyness with her, but
developed an intense admiration for her in every way--for her dresses, her
rings, her laces, for the elegancies that marked her a gentlewoman. She
pronounced them prettier than Mrs. Warner's things, and the house prettier
and larger.
"Should you like to live with me?" Annie asked.
The child seemed to reflect. Then she said, with the indirection of her age
and sex, pushing against Annie's knee, "I don't know what your name is."
"Have you never heard my name? It's Annie. How do you like it?"
"It's--it's too short," said the child, from her readiness always to answer
something that charmed Annie.
"Well, then you can make it longer. You can call me Aunt Annie. I think
that will be better for a little girl; don't you?"
"Mothers can whip, but aunts can't," said Idella, bringing a practical
knowledge, acquired from her observation of life Over the Track, to a
consideration of the proposed relation.
"I know _one_ aunt who won't," said Annie, touched by the reply.
Saturday evening Idella's father came for her; and with a preamble which
seemed to have been unnecessary when he understood it, Annie asked him to
let her keep the child, at least till he had settled himself in a house of
his own, or, she hinted, in some way more comfortable for Idella than he
was now living. In her anxiety to make him believe that she was not taking
too great a burden on her hands, she became slowly aware that no fear of
this had apparently troubled him, and that he was looking at the whole
matter from a point outside of questions of polite ceremonial, even of
personal feeling.