Ida a Novel Read Free Page B

women in the automobile must have dropped it. Ida picked it up and then she went away.
    So then Ida did everything an elected beauty does but every now and then she was lost.
    One day she saw a man he looked as if he had just come off a farm and with him was a very little woman and behind him was an ordinary-sized woman. Ida wondered about them. One day she saw again the woman with a big bundle of wash. She was talking to a man, he was a young man. Ida came up near them. Just then an automobile with two women came past and in the automobile was Ida’s dog Love, Ida was sure it was Love, of course it was Love and in its mouth it had a package, the same package Ida had picked up. There it all was and the woman with the bundle of wash and the young man and Ida, they all stood and looked and they did not any one of them say anything.
    Ida went on living with her great-aunt, there where they lived just outside of the city, she and her dog Love and her piano. She did write letters very often to her twin Ida.
    Dear Ida, she said.
Dear Ida,
So pleased so very pleased that you are winning, I might even call you Winnie because you are winning. You have won being a beautiful one the most beautiful one. One day I was walking with my dog Love and a man came up to him, held out his hand to him and said how do you do you the most beautiful one. I thought he was a very funny man and now they have decided that you are the one the most beautiful one. And one day the day you won, I saw a funny thing, I saw my dog Love belonging to some one. He did not belong to me he did belong to them. That made me feel very funny, but really it is not true he is here he belongs to me and you and now I will call you Winnie because you are winning everything and I am so happy that you are my twin.
Your twin, Ida-Ida
    And so Winnie was coming to be known to be Winnie.
    Winnie Winnie is what they said when they saw her and they were beginning to see her.
    They said it different ways. They said Winnie. And then they said Winnie.
    She knew.
    It is easy to make everybody say Winnie, yes Winnie. Sure I know Winnie. Everybody knows who Winnie is. It is not so easy, but there it is, everybody did begin to notice that Winnie is Winnie.
    This quite excited Ida and she wrote more letters to Winnie.
Dear Winnie,
Everybody knows who you are, and I know who you are. Dear Winnie we are twins and your name is Winnie. Never again will I not be a twin,
Your twin Ida
    So many things happened to Winnie. Why not when everybody knew her name.
    Once there were two people who met together. They said. What shall we do. So what did they do. They went to see Winnie. That is they went to look at Winnie.
    When they looked at her they almost began to cry. One said. What if I did not look at her did not look at Winnie. And the other said. Well that is just the way I feel about it.
    After a while they began to think that they had done it, that they had seen Winnie, that they had looked at her. It made them nervous because perhaps really had they.
    One said to the other. Say have we and the other answered back, say have we.
    Did you see her said one of them. Sure I saw her did you. Sure he said sure I saw her.
    They went back to where they came from.
    One day Ida went to buy some shoes. She liked to look at yellow shoes when she was going to buy red ones. She liked to look at black shoes when she was not going to buy any shoes at all.
    It was crowded in the shoe store. It was the day before Easter.
    There were a great many places but each one had some one, it is hard to try on shoes standing, hard, almost impossible and so she waited for her turn, a man was sitting next to his wife who was trying on shoes, he was not, and so not Ida but the saleswoman told him to get up, he did, and he did not look at Ida. Ida was used to that.
    The place was full, nobody looked at Ida. Some of them were talking about Winnie. They said. But really, is Winnie so interesting. They just talked and talked about