Free Lady by Thomas Tryon Page B

and I was complaining about skates for Rabbit Hornaday.
    "I'm sorry."
    She kissed me, and oh, the fragrance of her perfume, the tiny surge of blue through a vein in her throat, and those beautiful brown eyes smiling down. Oh, how I loved her, and oh, how I hated her to leave. But tomorrow, she promised as she tiptoed out, tomorrow, what larks.
    Lying on the pillows she had fluffed, under the counterpane she'd folded, warm and drowsy, and spoiled as an apple at the bottom of the barrel, I forgave her Rabbit Hornaday and resolved I would try to get to know him. Later, sorting again through the postcard views she had brought with the Roxy magic lantern, I thought what a very nice "lady" she was, and about how cruelly life had made her suffer, but knowing that she refused to be done in by it, and that she would content herself with the memory of Edward Harleigh. And it was from this period that I date the real beginning of our friendship, which lasted from that day, with one tragic interruption, until she died.
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    She continued coming every day, both mornings and afternoons. When Lew and Harry and Ag came home from school, they would hurry upstairs with their jam-and-peanut-butter sandwiches to the sleeping porch, drawn like nails to the magnet of Mrs. Harleigh, whom they also were now to call "Lady." With her in the house, Lew and Harry had never seemed less interested in their gang, or Aggie in her magazine stories, and when Nonnie came, trying to keep her eye on Kerney, but listening while Lady described the summerhouse she was planning to build that year, it seemed we were much more a family than we had been before.
    Once, coming in while Lew had Harry down on the floor and was pummeling him and Harry was trying to twist Lew's leg from the socket, Lady went and pulled them apart. She listened to both sides of the argument, then hugged them together, telling them that they were brothers, and brothers didn't fight, they stuck up for each other. That was the end of internecine warfare in our house, and after that there was only good-natured roughhousing, and even Aggie didn't seem so shy and inclined to stay by herself.
    Ma only shook her head, declaring helplessly that we were taking advantage of our neighbor. Once, on my way to the bathroom, I listened over the banister and heard them talking downstairs.
    "Mrs. Harleigh, I think my family must be exhausting you -- particularly that one. . . ." I knew who "that one" was.
    "Nonsense -- I'm enjoying every minute of it. If you don't mind sharing them . . ."
    "Heavens to Betsy, no. I'm glad of the chance to get my shoes off."
    "You have wonderful children."
    "Do I? Really?" It sounded as if the thought hadn't occurred to Ma before. Now when she came home, she seemed to have left her problems at the Sunbeam and hurried right upstairs to join the circle around my bed -- and around Lady. And in the evenings Lew and Harry would be at the worktable, putting together a crystal set, and talking to me over their shoulders, and for the first time I felt included instead of left out.
    It snowed again, and I watched them all out under the Great Elm, making snowmen, half a dozen at least, and, bored with being sick, I wished I could join the fun.
    "They're building a snow family out there, imagine!" Lady exclaimed when she came. She flung off her fur coat and I felt her cool cheek against my hot one as she kissed me. She had brought me clean pajamas from Elthea's laundry tubs, and when I had changed she rubbed my chest with Vicks and pinned on a clean flannel, watching the work out the window from time to time. Then she pulled up the chair and read to me, as she often did. Today it was the Hans Christian Andersen story, "The Snow Queen," appropriate for the weather, she said.
    An expression I could not instantly decipher came over her face as she told of the goblin whose mirror turned everything it reflected into something ugly, where "the loveliest landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and