“Yes,” said the mother strangely. “We’ll try to stop Aggie Lou from dying.”
“Oh, thank you, Mother!” cried Clarisse in triumph. “I guess we’ll show her!”
The mother smiled weakly, vaguely, closing her eyes. “Yes, I guess we will!”
MRS. SHEPHERD knocked at the back of the Partridge house. Mrs. Partridge answered. “Oh, hello, Helen.”
Mrs. Shepherd murmured something and stepped into the kitchen, thinking to herself. Then when she was seated in the kitchen eating nook she looked up at Mrs. Partridge and said, “I didn’t know about Aggie Lou.”
The carefully assembled smile on Mrs. Partridge’s face fell apart. She sat down, too, slowly. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
“No, of course you don’t, but I’ve been wondering...”
“About what?”
“It seems silly. But somehow I think we’ve raised our children wrong. I think we’ve told them the wrong things, or else we haven’t told them enough.”
“I don’t see what you mean,” said Mrs. Partridge.
“It’s just that Clarisse is jealous of Aggie Lou.”
“But that seems so strange. Why should she be jealous?”
“You know how children are. Sometimes one of them gets something, something neither good
nor bad nor worth wanting, and they build it into something shining and wonderful so all other children are jealous. Children have the most inexplicable methods of obtaining their ends. They promote jealousy with the most peculiar weapons, even Death. Clarisse doesn’t really want—want to be sick. She just—well—she just thinks she does. She doesn’t really know what Death is. She hasn’t been touched by it. Our family has been lucky. Her grandparents and cousins and uncles and aunts are all alive. There hasn’t been a death among us in twenty years at least.”
Mrs. Partridge drew into herself, and turned over Aggie Lou’s life as if it were a doll to be examined. “We’ve fed Aggie Lou on pretty dreams, too. She’s so young, and now with the illness, well, we thought we would make it easier for her if anything should happen.
“Yes, but don’t you see that it’s causing complications.”
“It’s making my daughter’s life bearable. I don’t know how she’d go on otherwise,” said Mrs. Partridge.
Mrs. Shepherd said, “Well, I’m going to tell my daughter tonight that it’s all nonsense, that she’s not to believe one more word of it.”
“But how thoughtless,” came back Mrs. Partridge. “She would only rush over and tell Aggie Lou, and Aggie Lou would—well—it just wouldn’t be right. You see?”
“But Clarisse is unhappy.”
“She has her health, at least. She can bear being unhappy awhile. Poor Aggie Lou, she deserves what little joy she can find.”
Mrs. Partridge had a good point and stuck to it. Mrs. Shepherd had to agree that it might be wise to let it go a while longer, “Except that Clarisse is so disturbed.”
IN THE next few days from her window Aggie Lou saw Clarisse all dressed up and going down the street and when she called to ask over the distance where Clarisse was going, Clarisse pivoted and with a shining white look, which was alien to her face, replied that she was going to church to pray for Aggie Lou to get well.
“Clarisse, you come back here, come back!” shouted Aggie Lou.
“Why, Aggie Lou,” said her parents to her, “how can you be so cross towards Clarisse, she’s so considerate, bothering to go all the way to church that way.”
Aggie Lou thumped over in bed, muttering into the pillow.
And when the new doctor appeared, Aggie Lou stared at him and his silver hypodermic and said, “Where’d he come from?”
The doctor, it turned out, was a cousin of Mr. Partridge’s who had experimented with some new injections which he promptly gave to Aggie Lou with a smile and only a little prickling pain to her arm.
“I suppose Clarisse had something to do with this?” asked Aggie Lou.
“Yes, she kept talking to her father and her father finally telegraphed the doctor.”