Shortly before the death of her aunt in California, Miss Julia
Pritchard had made up her mind to give up her position at the city desk
on her fiftieth birthday, and retire to some pleasant country town to
pass the remainder of her life quietly, in friendly intercourse with
her neighbors. She felt that she had more than enough to "see her
through," as the phrase is, very comfortably. She had worked for over
thirty years, her responsibilities and salary increasing periodically;
and though she had lived and dressed well and given liberally, she had
added each year to a small inheritance that had come to her through her
grandfather, and had gained further by judicious investment.
But when both her aunt and cousin died, and she was left guardian of
the sixteen-year-old Elsie Marley, whose inheritance was small, Miss
Pritchard decided to remain where she was a few years longer. It
wasn't imperative, indeed, yet she felt that the last little Pritchard
should have the best chance she could give her, and until she should
have put her on her feet, the woman of fifty, who was strong and well
and at the height of her powers, would gladly remain in harness. Her
announcement to this effect was hailed with delight at the office, and
another increase made in her salary so substantial that she declared
she ought to adopt a whole family.
Though the sacrifice was greater than any one dreamed, nevertheless she
made it quietly and cheerfully, expecting no reward nor desiring any.
She didn't expect much of Elsie Marley, indeed, recollecting the
atmosphere of the household in which the girl had been reared, which
she had herself found impossibly stifling during a short visit there
fifteen years before.
At that time her Cousin Augusta had been living with her husband and
baby in Portland, Oregon. What with her knowledge of the Pritchards in
general, however, her observation of that stereotyped family after a
long interval of years, and their intense anxiety lest the one
descendant of that branch become in any way a Marley rather than a
Pritchard, she was able to gather a very fair idea of what Elsie's
upbringing must have been. Unless she might have inherited a sense of
humor from the Marley side (which was unlikely, since no one possessing
a sense of humor would have married Augusta Pritchard), the girl could
hardly have escaped becoming a prig at the mildest. Cold, colorless,
correct, self-sufficient, Elsie Pritchard would doubtless make her
mother's cousin feel keenly her fifty years, her lack of grace, and her
general and utter lack of claim to the royal name she bore.
On the other hand, she was also, willy-nilly, Elsie _Marley_, and she
was only sixteen. She couldn't have, at that age, completely compassed
the woodenness of her adult relations. She might still be amenable to
change, to development. In any event, as Miss Pritchard remarked to a
friend in the office, any sort of young female connection cannot but be
welcome to the heart of a lonely spinster who reaches her half-century
milestone on midsummer's day.
Miss Pritchard occupied two large, handsome rooms on the second floor
of a boarding-house near Fifth Avenue, a few blocks from the lower end
of Central Park. In preparation for the young girl, she had the large
alcove of the parlor shut off by curtains and her bed and
dressing-table moved into it, and gave over her bedroom to Elsie. She
spent much time and thought and not a little money in making it an
inviting and attractive place for a girl, and would have felt quite
satisfied had it not been for her remembrance of the rather heavy but
stately elegance of the mansion in San Francisco.
On the June day on which Elsie was expected, Miss Pritchard confessed
to the friend at the office to whom she had spoken before, that she was
beginning to feel nervous.
"I almost wish she weren't coming until a week later," she said. "Do
you know, I think if I had actually passed my fiftieth birthday, I
might feel somehow more solid and fortified. It's really an ordeal for
an old-fashioned woman like myself to encounter the modern girl of
sixteen. Fifty might pull through, but oh, dear, what of forty-nine
plus?"
She was interrupted by the telephone. A telegram which had come to the
boarding-house for her was read to her. She was smiling as she hung up
the receiver.
"Well, what do you think!" she cried. "My young relative has decided
for some reason to take a later train and has telegraphed me to that
effect. Now there's something rather alert and self-reliant about
that. That girl must have something in her, after all. I can no more
imagine her mother or any of the family getting off at any stage of a
through journey than I could fancy myself not getting off for a fire or
an earthquake or, perhaps, for a wild West show. At the very least,
there's a sort of suppleness of mind indicated."
She stood that evening in the station watching the throng emerging from
the coaches of the train her cousin had given as hers. A tall,
straight woman, large without being stout, her plain face, with large,
irregular features, framed in plainly parted iron-grey hair, was
singularly strong and fine, and her grey eyes betokened experience
bravely met. As she scanned the face of every young girl in the
procession, there was something so staunch and true in her appearance
as to make it almost striking.
Then on a sudden, right in the midst of it, for a moment she forgot all
about Elsie Marley, and what she was standing there for, in the vision
that confronted her and surprisingly and instantaneously took her
romantic heart by storm. A young girl came straight toward her--such a
piquant, sparkling, buoyant young thing as she had never seen before--a
small, slender, dark-eyed creature with short brown hair cut square
like a little boy's and a charming mouth flanked by dimples that were
almost like pockets.
So much she took in in that one long glance. Then, recovering herself,
fearful lest she had been lost to all else about her longer than she
knew, she glanced anxiously about for the fair, pale little Pritchard.
But the radiant child stopped short before her and looked up into her
face.
"Cousin Julia?" she asked in the sweetest voice Miss Pritchard had ever
heard. She smiled half-shyly and the dimples deepened.
For a single instant, Miss Pritchard stood still and stared at the
girl, not so much incredulous as stunned. Then she cried out:
"Elsie--Elsie Marley?"
"Sure," said the smiling child, holding out her hand. Miss Pritchard
gathered her to her heart.