Jeanne was quite certain that her girl cousins had never _played_. Harold, to be sure, occasionally played jokes on the younger members of the family or on the servants; but they were usually rather cruel, unpleasant jokes, like putting a rat in Maggie's bed, or water in Pearl's shoes, or spiders down Clara's back. For Jeanne, he reserved the pleasant torture of teasing her about her father.
"Ugh!" he would say, holding Jeanne's precious mail as far as possible from him, while, with the other hand, he held his nose, "this must be for you--it smells of fish. Your father must have sold a couple while he was writing this."
Sometimes he would point to shoe advertisements in the papers, with: "Here's your chance, Miss Savage. No need to go barefoot when your five years are up. Just lay in a whopping supply of shoes, all sizes, at one-sixty-nine."
His grandfather liked his youngest grandchild's manners. He told himself, once he even told his son, that he couldn't possibly give any affection to the daughter of "that wretched Frenchman" who had stolen _his_ daughter. Perhaps he couldn't, just at first. No doubt, he _thought_ he couldn't. But he _did_. 'Way down in his lonesome old heart he was glad that mathematics were hard for her, because he was glad that she needed his help.
"Just what are you thinking?" asked her grandfather, one day.
"I was making an example," explained Jeanne. "I've been here seven months. That leaves four years and five months; but the last two months went faster than the first two. If five years seemed like a thousand years to begin with, and the last two months--"
"I refuse," said her grandfather, with a sudden twinkle in his eye, "to tackle any such example as that."
"Well," laughed Jeanne, "here's another. Miss Wardell asked us in school today to decide what we'd like to do when we're grown up. We're to tell her tomorrow."
"Ye--es," said Jeanne. "You see, ever since I visited Miss Warden's sister's kindergarten, I've thought I'd like to teach _that_. But I thought I'd like to get married, too."
"Get married. I should like to bring up a family _right_--with the proper tools. Old Captain says you have to have the proper tools to sew with. _I_ think you have to have the proper tools to bring up a family. Tooth-brushes and stocking-straps, smelly soap and cold cream and underclothes."