Alice Adams - Booth Tarkington (chrome ebook reader .TXT) 📗

married they can do anything they want to with each other. Why can’t they do the same thing after they’re married? When you and papa were young people and engaged, he’d have done anything you wanted him to. That must have been because you knew how to manage him then. Why can’t you go at him the same way now?”

Mrs. Adams sighed again, and laughed a little, making no other response; but Alice persisted. “Well, why can’t you? Why can’t you ask him to do things the way you used to ask him when you were just in love with each other? Why don’t you anyhow try it, mama, instead of ding-donging at him?”

“ ‘Ding-donging at him,’ Alice?” Mrs. Adams said, with a pathos somewhat emphasized. “Is that how my trying to do what I can for you strikes you?”

“Never mind that; it’s nothing to hurt your feelings.” Alice disposed of the pathos briskly. “Why don’t you answer my question? What’s the matter with using a little more tact on papa? Why can’t you treat him the way you probably did when you were young people, before you were married? I never have understood why people can’t do that.”

“Perhaps you will understand someday,” her mother said, gently. “Maybe you will when you’ve been married twenty-five years.”

“You keep evading. Why don’t you answer my question right straight out?”

“There are questions you can’t answer to young people, Alice.”

“You mean because we’re too young to understand the answer? I don’t see that at all. At twenty-two a girl’s supposed to have some intelligence, isn’t she? And intelligence is the ability to understand, isn’t it? Why do I have to wait till I’ve lived with a man twenty-five years to understand why you can’t be tactful with papa?”

“You may understand some things before that,” Mrs. Adams said, tremulously. “You may understand how you hurt me sometimes. Youth can’t know everything by being intelligent, and by the time you could understand the answer you’re asking for you’d know it, and wouldn’t need to ask. You don’t understand your father, Alice; you don’t know what it takes to change him when he’s made up his mind to be stubborn.”

Alice rose and began to get herself into a skirt. “Well, I don’t think making scenes ever changes anybody,” she grumbled. “I think a little jolly persuasion goes twice as far, myself.”

“ ‘A little jolly persuasion’!” Her mother turned the echo of this phrase into an ironic lament. “Yes, there was a time when I thought that, too! It didn’t work; that’s all.”

“Perhaps you left the ‘jolly’ part of it out, mama.”

For the second time that morning⁠—it was now a little after seven o’clock⁠—tears seemed about to offer their solace to Mrs. Adams. “I might have expected you to say that, Alice; you never do miss a chance,” she said, gently. “It seems queer you don’t some time miss just one chance!”

But Alice, progressing with her toilet, appeared to be little concerned. “Oh, well, I think there are better ways of managing a man than just hammering at him.”

Mrs. Adams uttered a little cry of pain. “ ‘Hammering,’ Alice?”

“If you’d left it entirely to me,” her daughter went on, briskly, “I believe papa’d already be willing to do anything we want him to.”

“That’s it; tell me I spoil everything. Well, I won’t interfere from now on, you can be sure of it.”

“Please don’t talk like that,” Alice said, quickly. “I’m old enough to realize that papa may need pressure of all sorts; I only think it makes him more obstinate to get him cross. You probably do understand him better, but that’s one thing I’ve found out and you haven’t. There!” She gave her mother a friendly tap on the shoulder and went to the door. “I’ll hop in and say hello to him now.”

As she went, she continued the fastening of her blouse, and appeared in her father’s room with one hand still thus engaged, but she patted his forehead with the other.

“Poor old papa-daddy!” she said, gaily. “Every time he’s better somebody talks him into getting so mad he has a relapse. It’s a shame!”

Her father’s eyes, beneath their melancholy brows, looked up at her wistfully. “I suppose you heard your mother going for me,” he said.

“I heard you going for her, too!” Alice laughed. “What was it all about?”

“Oh, the same danged old story!”

“You mean she wants you to try something new when you get well?” Alice asked, with cheerful innocence. “So we could all have a lot more money?”

At this his sorrowful forehead was more sorrowful than ever. The deep horizontal lines moved upward to a pattern of suffering so familiar to his daughter that it meant nothing to her; but he spoke quietly. “Yes; so we wouldn’t have any money at all, most likely.”

“Oh, no!” she laughed, and, finishing with her blouse, patted his cheeks with both hands. “Just think how many grand openings there must be for a man that knows as much as you do! I always did believe you could get rich if you only cared to, papa.”

But upon his forehead the painful pattern still deepened. “Don’t you think we’ve always had enough, the way things are, Alice?”

“Not the way things are!” She patted his cheeks again; laughed again. “It used to be enough, maybe anyway we did skimp along on it⁠—but the way things are now I expect mama’s really pretty practical in her ideas, though, I think it’s a shame for her to bother you about it while you’re so weak. Don’t you worry about it, though; just think about other things till you get strong.”

“You know,” he said; “you know it isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world for a man of my age to find these grand openings you speak of. And when you’ve passed halfway from fifty to sixty you’re apt to see some risk in giving up what you know how to do and trying something new.”

“My, what a frown!” she cried, blithely. “Didn’t I tell you to stop thinking about