The Priceless Pearl

								

finicky, "I don't like to lock up the house until she comes in."
"I think you're right," said her brother. These were the things that
terrified him so--a little girl out in the blackness of that beach in
her pajamas. How could he go to Mexico and leave her? He rose and went
to the edge of the piazza, which rested on the dunes.
He could see nothing but the stars.
"Shall I call her?" he said.
"I hate to wake her; but--yes, just give a call."
He shouted, and in a few seconds a faint, cheerful hullo reached them,
and a little figure appeared over the dunes.
"Were you asleep, darling?" said her mother.
"No, I was swimming," said Antonia. She stepped within the circle of
light from the windows, and Wood could see that her dark curly hair was
plastered to her head, and her pajamas clung to her like tissue paper.
"I love to swim at night," she said. "It makes you feel like a spirit."
She shared her more important thoughts with her uncle. Then, turning
to her mother, she advanced toward her with outstretched arms as if to
clasp her in a wet embrace.
"Look out for your mother's dress," said Wood, for Edna Conway was as
usual perfectly dressed in white. She smiled at him and took the child
to her breast.
"Dear Anthony," she said, "if you were married you'd know that a woman
loves her children better than her clothes."
He was silent, wondering if she knew how much she had had to do with
the fact that he wasn't married. He had no taste for masculine women,
and yet Edna had made him distrustful of all femininity which sooner or
later developed the sweet obstinacy, the clinging pig-headedness, the
subtle ability, under the idiotic coyness of a kitten, to get its own
way. Well off and physically attractive, he had not been neglected by
women, but always sooner or later it had seemed to him that he had seen
the dread shadow of kittenishness. Cattishness he could have borne, but
the kitten in woman disgusted him.
"And, dearest," his sister was saying to her daughter, "you won't go to
bed in your wet things, will you?"
Antonia shook her finger at her mother.
"Now don't begin to be fussy," she said, not impudently, but as one
equal gives advice to another. Yet even this mild suggestion of reproof
was painful to Edna.
She turned to her brother and said passionately, "I'm not fussy, am I?
I don't see how you can say that, Antonia. It's only that your uncle
wouldn't close an eye if he thought you were sleeping in damp pajamas;
would you, Anthony?" And she laughed gayly.
This was one of her most irritating ways--to pretend that she was just
a wild thing like the children, but that to oblige some stuffy older
person she was forced to ask the children to conform.
"I might close an eye, at that," said Anthony.
The whole incident had finally decided him to take the prospective
governess entirely into his confidence. He had thought at first it
would be more honorable to let her discover the situation for herself,