It is, O master! Mrs. Watts has always made it very much her affair, from _Nathan Burke_ to the present hour. In her is laughter, as when, in _The Rudder_, Marshall Cook, the author, inspects the plant of Amzi Loring, the “ice king.” Mr. Loring is a self-made man. Cook watches the machinery spill blocks of ice weighing 300 pounds each.
“‘Beautifully clear! I was just thinking it was like a great glass box,’ said Cook. ‘It had no look of being solid.’
“‘Um-huh. Well, I _have_ seen things put inside it,’ said the other, sly anticipation suddenly appearing on his features. He nodded significantly to the puller; and presently with another clang, another wail of escaping air, there boomed down upon the runway and fled past them another three hundred pounds with a dark object embedded in the middle of it, at sight of which Cook gave an exclamation.
“‘What!’ he shouted, rushing to peer after it.
“‘I told ’em to save out that cake and send it up to the house for you,’ said Amzi One, smiling, well-pleased. ‘You’ll see it again when you get home.’”
A copy of Mr. Cook’s latest book had been frozen in the ice cake.
“‘Mr. Loring,’ said Cook solemnly. He paused, swallowing with a mighty effort, even some slight contortion of the facial muscles.... ‘Mr. Loring, my work has seldom had a--a token of appreciation that I--I value m-more--ahem--ho, ha--_ahem, hem_--!’”
Tears! Yes, there are tears for those who can shed them in _Nathan Burke_, where, indeed, the chapters describing Jim Sharpless’s critical illness in the shabby little boarding house kept by the exasperating but pitiful Mrs. Slaney read more like Dickens than Thackeray. Tenderness? There is first and last a good deal of it, expended oftentimes upon individuals with whom Mrs. Watts teaches us a wise patience. There is a deserved tenderness in the close of the first part of _The Boardman Family_, relieved instantly by one of those swift transitions which occur in life. Sandra Boardman has decided to go to New York. She intends to become a professional dancer.
“She went to bed early that night; and after a while Mrs. Alexander Boardman, going quietly upstairs, stopped at her granddaughter’s door and looked in. There was some disorder; Sandra’s trunk had already gone, but her little valise stood open on a chair, waiting for the last odds and ends; there were her gloves and hat and her nattily rolled umbrella laid together. Mrs. Alexander went in a step; by the light from the hall she could see Sandra sound asleep, with her long, thick, black hair braided and tied up in a ribbon, lying across the pillow; she looked very small and young. On the night-stand beside the bed, there was the watch her father had given her on her nineteenth birthday, a girl’s watch that never kept time, a foolish elegant trifle; and there was a half-eaten apple which she had probably been too sleepy to finish. Somehow these things, this inefficient watch, this apple with a bite or two out of it, suddenly seemed to the old lady poignantly pathetic; a hundred times she had seen Sandra thus in her crib, with a toy, a cooky alongside; Richard, too, when he was a baby. Old Sarah Chase Boardman, whose past, like everybody’s past, must have held some unpleasing chapters, who went to church and subscribed to charities and practiced an unswerving courtesy all for no better reason than because it appeared to her the part of a lady, who believed nothing about God save that, if He existed, He must surely be a gentleman--old Sarah Boardman got down on her knees then and there and put up some lame petition for this young girl.