The Moth Read Online Free PDF

to the Bishop, at anything you could think of. It caused kind of a situation at home. By now, of course, I had to come out with it that Miss Eleanor had given me a little help, so of course nothing would suit Nancy but that I had to switch to a good teacher, like a friend of hers, Mrs. Pyle, and of course Sheila took it for granted she would play for me. That didn’t sit so well with Miss Eleanor, because I think I’ve told you about Sheila’s ideas on how to ruin a number at one fell swoop. It was the Old Man that knocked it all in the head, and for the right reason: “The two of you will keep hands off, for it’s my considered opinion that you don’t know enough music between you to shake out a Tipperary clog, and why you’d be cluthering into it I don’t know. The little lady, the rector’s niece, seems to have things well in hand. Lad, do you knew The Minstrel Boy?”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “Ah well, it makes no difference.”
    But he didn’t know his son’s slick ways. In the house was an album with The Minstrel Boy in it, so of course in ten seconds I was in the hallway, singing it for him, reading at sight. That clinched everything.
    Who Miss Eleanor finally picked to play for me was a girl named Margaret Legg, whose family owned one of the big hotels in town, the Cartaret, over on Charles Street. She was about my age, and played a lot better than Sheila. We made a nice pair, specially after we got booked into a New York vaudeville house, she in kind of an Alice in Wonderland outfit Miss Eleanor got her, me with a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, all in blue velvet with Buster Brown collar. We were always spic and span, as her mother was always there, in New York and the other places we went, and she shined us both till we gave off sparks.
    Margaret pulled one thing I didn’t understand. She went to a private school, Kenneth Hall, where most of the girls boarded, but some came from Baltimore as day scholars. One Friday she asked me to take her to the german, as she called it, that the school gave now and then, and that the girls could invite their friends to. I was all crossed up. The big news with me was I had my first long-pants suit, and as I had grown exactly as tall as Miss Eleanor, I had invited her to go to a movie that was coming to town, called Little Old New York, with a girl in it named Marion Davies, and some old-time fire engines. I sulked, but she kept saying we could see the movie some other time, and I had better take Margaret to the german. So I did and we led some kind of a march they started with, and I felt like I had been sent off to the tots’ wading pool. But what got me, after I took her home, was that she started bawling, right there in the lobby of the hotel, with her mother and father and a dozen people looking on. After that I took her around quite a lot, on Miss Eleanor’s say-so, though what it had to do with our appearing together I couldn’t see. There was only one thing about her I liked, at least at that time, and that was her baby sister Helen. She was just able to walk when I first ran into her, and was the cutest thing I had ever seen. I used to bring her apples and ice cream and lollipops and gocarts, and play with her by the hour, and a new word she learned was bigger stuff to me than knocking off an E flat above C, which finally became my record for the event.
    The row with Anderson came just as Miss Eleanor was packing for St. Louis, where she was to sing some summer opera, so she had hurried home after service, and wasn’t there for the grand finale. The phone kept ringing, and I didn’t answer, as by that time the cook had gone and I was alone in the house. About five my father and Nancy and Sheila drove up in a cab, and about five thirty the phone rang again. Nancy answered, and it was the mother of one of the cutie pies. So now they had it, here in the house. I went on the carpet, before Nancy and Sheila, with my father listening, his face dark. What I told