“Can’t!” he exclaimed.  “What do you mean by that?”

“Oh, nothing to make a fuss about,” she said with a frown of irritation.  “I wish you weren’t so jumpy this morning,—­or perhaps, it’s I that am.  All I meant was that home isn’t a comfortable place for me and I won’t go back there if I can help it—­only I am afraid I can’t.  That’s the trouble I wanted to talk to you about.”

“I thought you liked the new stepmother,” he said.  “Hasn’t she turned out well?—­What am I supposed to call her, anyhow?  I wanted to find out about that before I was right up against it.”

“Call her?” Mary was a little taken back.  “Why, anything you like, I should think.  I’ve always called her Paula.—­You weren’t thinking of calling her mother, were you?”

“Well,” he protested, “how should I know?  After all, she is father’s wife.  And she must be fairly old.”

“But, Rush, you’ve seen her!”

“Only that once, at the wedding.  She was made up to look young then, of course.  Painted and dyed and so on, I suppose.  I felt so embarrassed and silly over the whole thing—­being just a kid—­that I hardly looked at her.  And that was a long while ago.”

Mary laughed at that, though she knew it would annoy him.  “She never paints nor dyes nor anything, Ruddy.  She doesn’t have to.  She’s such a perfectly raving beauty without it.  And she’s more beautiful now than she was then.  She really is young, you see.  Hardly enough older than we are to matter, now that we’re grown up.”

She saw Rush digesting this idea of a beautiful young stepmother whom he was to be privileged to call—­straight off—­by her first name, with a certain satisfaction, so she waited—­rather conscious that she was being patient—­for him to come back from the digression of his own accord.  Presently he did.

“What does she do that you don’t like?”

“She does nothing that isn’t perfectly nice, and good-tempered, and—­respectable,” Mary assured him, and added on a warmer note, “Oh, and she’s really amiable and lovely.  I was being a cat.  But I am truly fond of her—­when I have her to myself.  It’s when she’s with father ...”

She broke off there, seeing that she could not make that clear to him (how could she since she would not state it in plain terms to herself?) and hurried on, “It’s really father whom I don’t get on with, any more.  He worries about me and feels sorry for me and wants me to come home.  But I’m nothing to him when I do come—­but an embarrassment.—­No, it isn’t rot.  He knows it himself and feels horrid about it and raises my allowance when I go away, though it was foolishly big already; and then, as soon as I’m back here he begins worrying again, and urging me to come home.  He didn’t insist as long as I was doing war work, but now that that’s played out, I suppose he will.

“Oh, I know well enough what I ought to do.  I ought to answer some advertisement for a typist—­I can do that, but not stenography—­and take a regular job.  The sort you said you’d shoot Mr. Whitney for offering you.  And then I ought to take a hall bedroom somewhere in the cross-town twenties and live on what I earned.  That’s the only thing I can see, and, Rush, I simply haven’t the courage to do it.  It seems as if I couldn’t do it.”