Little Women, Louisa May Alcott [free books to read txt] 📗

The song was considered a great success, and the singer retired covered with laurels. But a few minutes afterward, he forgot his manners entirely, and stared at Amy putting on her bonnet; for she had been introduced simply as “my sister,” and no one had called her by her new name since he came. He forgot himself still further when Laurie said, in his most gracious manner, at parting⁠—

“My wife and I are very glad to meet you, sir. Please remember that there is always a welcome waiting for you over the way.”

Then the Professor thanked him so heartily, and looked so suddenly illuminated with satisfaction, that Laurie thought him the most delightfully demonstrative old fellow he ever met.

“I too shall go; but I shall gladly come again, if you will gif me leave, dear madame, for a little business in the city will keep me here some days.”

He spoke to Mrs. March, but he looked at Jo; and the mother’s voice gave as cordial an assent as did the daughter’s eyes; for Mrs. March was not so blind to her children’s interest as Mrs. Moffat supposed.

“I suspect that is a wise man,” remarked Mr. March, with placid satisfaction, from the hearthrug, after the last guest had gone.

“I know he is a good one,” added Mrs. March, with decided approval, as she wound up the clock.

“I thought you’d like him,” was all Jo said, as she slipped away to her bed.

She wondered what the business was that brought Mr. Bhaer to the city, and finally decided that he had been appointed to some great honor, somewhere, but had been too modest to mention the fact. If she had seen his face when, safe in his own room, he looked at the picture of a severe and rigid young lady, with a good deal of hair, who appeared to be gazing darkly into futurity, it might have thrown some light upon the subject, especially when he turned off the gas, and kissed the picture in the dark.

“Please, Madam Mother, could you lend me my wife for half an hour? The luggage has come, and I’ve been making hay of Amy’s Paris finery, trying to find some things I want,” said Laurie, coming in the next day to find Mrs. Laurence sitting in her mother’s lap, as if being made “the baby” again.

“Certainly. Go, dear; I forget that you have any home but this,” and Mrs. March pressed the white hand that wore the wedding-ring, as if asking pardon for her maternal covetousness.

“I shouldn’t have come over if I could have helped it; but I can’t get on without my little woman any more than a⁠—”

“Weathercock can without wind,” suggested Jo, as he paused for a simile; Jo had grown quite her own saucy self again since Teddy came home.

“Exactly; for Amy keeps me pointing due west most of the time, with only an occasional whiffle round to the south, and I haven’t had an easterly spell since I was married; don’t know anything about the north, but am altogether salubrious and balmy, hey, my lady?”

“Lovely weather so far; I don’t know how long it will last, but I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship. Come home, dear, and I’ll find your bootjack; I suppose that’s what you are rummaging after among my things. Men are so helpless, mother,” said Amy, with a matronly air, which delighted her husband.

“What are you going to do with yourselves after you get settled?” asked Jo, buttoning Amy’s cloak as she used to button her pinafores.

“We have our plans; we don’t mean to say much about them yet, because we are such very new brooms, but we don’t intend to be idle. I’m going into business with a devotion that shall delight grandfather, and prove to him that I’m not spoilt. I need something of the sort to keep me steady. I’m tired of dawdling, and mean to work like a man.”

“And Amy, what is she going to do?” asked Mrs. March, well pleased at Laurie’s decision, and the energy with which he spoke.

“After doing the civil all round, and airing our best bonnet, we shall astonish you by the elegant hospitalities of our mansion, the brilliant society we shall draw about us, and the beneficial influence we shall exert over the world at large. That’s about it, isn’t it, Madame Récamier?” asked Laurie, with a quizzical look at Amy.

“Time will show. Come away, Impertinence, and don’t shock my family by calling me names before their faces,” answered Amy, resolving that there should be a home with a good wife in it before she set up a salon as a queen of society.

“How happy those children seem together!” observed Mr. March, finding it difficult to become absorbed in his Aristotle after the young couple had gone.

“Yes, and I think it will last,” added Mrs. March, with the restful expression of a pilot who has brought a ship safely into port.

“I know it will. Happy Amy!” and Jo sighed, then smiled brightly as Professor Bhaer opened the gate with an impatient push.

Later in the evening, when his mind had been set at rest about the bootjack, Laurie said suddenly to his wife, who was flitting about, arranging her new art treasures⁠—

“Mrs. Laurence.”

“My lord!”

“That man intends to marry our Jo!”

“I hope so; don’t you, dear?”

“Well, my love, I consider him a trump, in the fullest sense of that expressive word, but I do wish he was a little younger and a good deal richer.”

“Now, Laurie, don’t be too fastidious and worldly-minded. If they love one another it doesn’t matter a particle how old they are nor how poor. Women never should marry for money⁠—” Amy caught herself up short as the words escaped her, and looked at her husband, who replied, with malicious gravity⁠—

“Certainly not, though you do hear charming girls say that they intend to do it sometimes. If my memory serves me, you once thought it your duty to make a rich