Nor was she at
once to be convinced that she might safely leave her work. I suspect
that she had found cause in the past to rank her mother with Clem as a
weigher and disburser of moneys. I noticed that she chose to accept Miss
Caroline's earliest letters about their good fortune with a sort of
half-tolerant attention, as an elder listens to the wonder-tales of an
imaginative child, or as I had long listened to Clem's own dreamy-eyed
recital of the profits already his from "brillions" of chickens not yet
come even to the egg-stage of their careers.
Not until Miss Caroline had ceased from large and beauteous phrases
about "the great good fortune that has befallen us in the strangest
manner"--not until she descended to actual, dumfounding figures with
powerful little dollar-marks back of them, did her daughter seem to
permit herself the sweet alarms of hope. Even in that moment she did not
forget that she knew her own mother, for she took the precaution to
elicit a confirmatory letter from her mother's attorney, under guise of
thanking him for the friendly interest he had "ever manifested" in the
welfare of the Lansdales.
It occurred to me that Little Miss had been endowed, either by nature or
experience, with a marked distrust of mere seemings.
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