. She's fixing over her
house, and she runs and asks Aunt Jane's advice about every little
thing. She asks Father's, too, every chance she gets, when she sees
him in the hall or on the front steps. I heard her tell Aunt Jane
she considered Professor Anderson a man of most excellent taste and
judgment.

I suppose Mrs. Darling _could_ be my new mother. She's a widow. Her
husband died last year. She is very well off now that her husband
is dead, I heard Aunt Jane say one day. She meant well off in
money--quite a lot of it, you know. I _thought_ she meant well off
because he was dead and she didn't have to live with him any more,
and I said so to Aunt Jane. (He was a cross man, and very stern, as
everybody knew.) But, dear suz me! Aunt Jane was awfully shocked, and
said certainly not; that she meant Mr. Darling had left his wife a
great deal of money.

Then she talked very stern and solemn to me, and said that I must not
think just because my poor dear father's married life had ended in
such a wretched tragedy that every other home had such a skeleton in
the closet.

_I_ grew stern and dignified and solemn then. I knew, of course, what
she meant. I'm no child. She meant Mother. She meant that Mother, my
dear blessed mother, was the skeleton in their closet. And of course I
wasn't going to stand there and hear that, and not say a word.

But I didn't say just a word. I said a good many words. I won't try to
put them all down here; but I told her quietly, in a firm voice, and
with no temper (showing), that I guessed Father was just as much of a
skeleton in Mother's closet as she was in his; and that if she could
see how perfectly happy my mother was now she'd understand a little of
what my father's skeleton had done to her all those years she'd had to
live with it.

I said a lot more, but before I'd got half finished with what I wanted
to say, I got to crying, so I just had to run out of the room.

That night I heard Aunt Jane tell Mrs. Darling that the worst feature
of the whole deplorable situation was the effect on the child's mind,
and the wretched conception it gave her of the sacredness of the
marriage tie, or something like that. And Mrs. Darling sighed, and
said, oh, and ah, and the pity of it.

I don't like Mrs. Darling.

Of course, as I said before, Mrs. Darling could be my new mother,
being a widow, so. But, mercy! I hope she won't. I'd rather have Miss
Grace Ann than her, and I shouldn't be crazy about h