"Isn't Aunt Sue the dearest person you ever saw!" exclaimed Helen Fairmont
as she and her visitor sank into a garden seat in the beautiful grounds
surrounding Mrs. Armour's lovely home. "Nothing ever seems to be too much
trouble for her, if she can make others happy."
"Yes," answered Mary Sutton, "I just felt like giving her a good hug when
she told you her plan. It is really just for me that she is going to let
you give the picnic here."
"Just for that very reason. It will be simply fine. O, she is so sweet! You
see, two weeks ago, when you wrote that finally you could arrange to visit
me for the summer, I was so full of the good news that I couldn't get to
Aunt Sue's quickly enough to tell her about it,--somehow one always wants
to tell Aunt Sue about things,--and she said she used to go to school with
your mother, and was very fond of her, and she was all ready to like you,
too, and that just the very minute you reached here, we were both to come
over--I mean you and I were."
"O, dear," laughed Mary, "I think you'd better stop and take a good long
breath, and get the we's and you's straightened."
"I don't care," Helen went chattering on. "You know what I mean, just what
we've done. We, you and I,--is that right?--were to come to her house and
choose what kind of entertainment we wanted her to give, so you might meet
my friends."
"Who thought of the garden picnic?" inquired Mary, her face all animation.
Then, not waiting for Helen's answer, she said, enthusiastically, "Isn't
this a beautiful spot in which to have a picnic?"
The girls stopped talking long enough to look about at the pride of Mrs.
Armour's heart, the lovely grounds round her home. They surrounded a fine
old house of colonial type, for which they made a pretty setting. A double
row of dignified and ancient elms flanked a pathway leading from the gate.
The lawn on each side of the walk made one think of the answer the English
gardener gave to the inquiry as to the cause of the velvety beauty of
England's lawns. "Why, sir," said he, "we sows 'em, and we mows 'em, and we
mows 'em, and we sows 'em." Mrs. Armour's lawn had the appearance of having
undergone a like experience. At the back and sides of the house was a
variety of shrubs and bushes whose blossoms in the spring made the place
indescribably sweet. Mrs. Armour boasted that there were forty kinds of
bushes, but her husband laughingly said that he had never been able to
count more than thirty-nine and a half; "for you certainly couldn't call
that Japanese dwarf a whole one!"
June roses ran riot in season. Later, more cultivated varieties, blooming
regularly through the summer, took their part in providing fragrance.
Sweet, old-fashioned garden plants and more valuable products, procured at
much trouble and expense, helped to make a bower that might have satisfied
even more fastidious eyes than those which reveled in them now.
Mrs. Armour's great delight was in using her garden, and she had given
Helen the privilege of inviting all her young friends to picnic there the
following Thursday evening.
"And, O Mary, you just can't imagine how pretty it is here with the Chinese
lanterns swung from tree to tree, and the dainty tables scattered round!"
Helen scarcely contain herself.
Mary laughed merrily. She was equally delighted but naturally she took
everything in a more quiet manner. Smiling at Helen's exuberance of spirit,
she asked, "What was it your aunt said about the sandwiches?"
"She wants to help us make them, and she was telling me she'd like me to
cut them a little more carefully than I did the last time I helped her.
You'd never think Aunt Sue has a hobby, would you?"
"No, I don't think I should."
"Well, she has. She's the most particular old darling about little things
that you ever saw. Now those sandwiches I made I will admit were not cut
very evenly, but, dear me! they tasted good enough. Tom Canton ate six. I
told her so, but she said they should have looked good, too."
"Well, what's her hobby?"
"I just told you. It's trifles. She says life is made of them, and trifles
with the rough edges polished off make beautiful lives. And she loves to
quote such things as, 'Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no
trifle.' She says trifles decide almost everything for us, and shape our
characters. She says it is interesting to study how most big things grow
from little ones.
"Helen, I think she's right." Mary's dark, thoughtful eyes looked into her
friend's.
"O, I don't! It isn't trifles, trifles, that decide things and make the
real difference. It is the big things. For instance, it is brother Tom's
education in the school of technology that placed him in the responsible
position we are all so proud of him for obtaining."
"Yes, but I heard him say himself that he just happened, by mistake, to
leave one of his scribbled figures on your uncle's desk, and your uncle,
picking it up by mistake, too, said that a boy who could do that should
have a chance at the right training."
"Why, that's a fact, Mary mine," said Helen, in surprise. "I never thought
of it in that way. Well, I won't agree that it happens so often. For
example,"--glancing about for an idea, she caught sight of a young man, a
former schoolmate, passing just in front of the Armour home,--"for example,
I don't suppose it was a trifle that made Alson Jarvis turn out the kind of
individual he has become lately. He used to be a fine boy, but I am afraid
he is getting dissipated. He doesn't go with our crowd much now. I guess he
is not invited the way he used to be before he began going with those South
Town boys."
"I wish I could prove to you my side of the argument. Let's try your Aunt
Sue's idea of studying how the big things come from little ones. Wouldn't
it be interesting to find the cause of this one case? I would not be one
bit surprised if it were just some little thing which was the pivot that
turned him."
"All right," agreed Helen. "I don't believe your theory, but it would be
fun, as you say, to try it. Will"--Will was her brother--"insists Al's not
so black as he has been painted lately. We will get Will to find out for us
if he can."
Then the talk drifted to the more absorbing subject of sandwiches and
cakes.
At dinner-time the two girls confided to the accommodating Will their
desire to find what had changed Al.
"Trying to pry into private closets, regardless of the kind of welcome
their enclosed skeletons may accord you, are you?" said Will, banteringly.
Mary, not accustomed to his teasing, blushed, wondering if she had really
been guilty of an indelicate presumption, but Helen spoke up quickly in
their defense:--
"Now, Will you know perfectly well it is not any such thing. As a pledge of
our good faith--does that sound nice and lawyer-like?" Will was studying
law, and Helen, too, liked to tease occasionally--"I do affirm that if you
will do that for us, I will do something nice for him, on your account."
"Then I certainly will. It is what I have been trying to convince you for a
month that you ought to do."
The girls told him why it was they were so anxious to know more of Alson's
private affairs.
"I would like to prove that your Aunt Sue and I are right, you know," said
Mary.
"Well," said Will, turning to his sister's guest, "don't let them prejudice
you against Al. He is off the track just now, I know. The girls are not
having much to do with him, but I have seen worse than he is." Will went
off whistling. The next day he was ready with his report.
"Girls," he began, "Mary wins in the argument about trifles, and as a
result I am feeling pretty mean about the business. I guess I am the trifle
in the case."
Both girls laughed as they glanced at his six feet of length, and his
great, broad shoulders.
"O, it is no laughing matter," he said, good-naturedly. "This is the way it
happened: Washington's birthday, you know, everything in town was closed,
and I thought, as Al was living in a boarding-house, I would better ask
mother if I might bring him home the night before, and have him spend the
day here with us; we were going to have a kind of celebration anyway, you
know. So about seven o'clock that evening, just before I started for the
travel lecture, I ran up to mother's room. It was on the tip of my tongue
to ask her if she would not include Al in the number of her guests, when I
noticed that she looked pretty blue. I know she whisked away a tear so I
should not get sight of it. I pretended I didn't see it but I said, 'Got
some troubles, little mother?'"
Helen knew in just what a hearty, cheerful way he said it.
"'Not very many, dear,' she said; but I didn't feel like bothering her
about anything then, and decided it would do just as well to bring Al home
the following Saturday night and keep him over Sunday."
Will looked dubious.
"But it didn't do," he continued. "Having nothing to keep him busy that
holiday, Al went off with a crowd he had always before refused to join--a
pretty gay set, I am afraid. The man who had half promised him the position
he had been slaving for during the past year happened to see him with those
people, and the very next day he informed Al very curtly that, after due
consideration, he found he had no place for him. Alson guessed why, and now
he feels reckless, and says he might as well have the game as the name,
might as well be really bad since he has to suffer anyway. He talked in a
desperate sort of way this morning when he told me about it. Somehow I feel
responsible for the whole thing, because I hesitated about asking mother."
Will looked thoughtfully across at the girls, whose faces expressed real
sympathy. Suddenly Helen exclaimed:--
"The night before Washington's birthday, you say?"
"Yes."
"Mother was nearly crying alone in her room?"
"Yes."
"About seven o'clock?"
"Yes. Is this a cross-examination?"
"Then," said Helen, sitting upright and paying no attention to her
brother's question, "it's all my fault."
"How?"
"Bridget was out that evening, and I had to stay home from the lecture to
put away the dinner things and I said I did not see why I always had to do
such disagreeable things. I did not see why all our relations were rich,
and why we had to be always scrimping and missing everything. Of course I
repented in a little while and apologized. It made mother feel pretty bad,
I knew, but I did not think she minded it as much as that, though."
"It was a pretty serious mix-up all around, wasn't it, sister?" Will spoke
consolingly, but he looked worried.
"Well," came Mary's soothing tones, "you must not take all the blame, for
probably there were a great many more 'little nothings' that had something
to do with it. Al must take his share, too."
"Yes, perhaps," said Will; "but we have to take the blame that belongs to
us."
Helen was aghast at the enormous result of her few minutes' irritability.
Such outbursts were not common with her. There was a catch in her voice as
she said, "Poor Al!"
Mary went directly to the heart of the matter. "It is done," she said. "It
is somebody's fault, of course, but what is to be done first to rectify
it?"
"I don't know, I am sure," Helen answered, musingly. "I have not had a
thought of anything but the garden picnic for the last two days, and I
don't seem to have any idea but picnic in my head."
"O, good!" ejaculated Mary. The joy of the discoverer shone in her eyes.
"The picnic! That is just the thing. Ask him, of course."
Alson Jarvis had hidden the hurts of his schoolmates' recent slights under
a nonchalant manner. Each one, while it cut deeply, seemed to aggravate him
to greater wilfulness. Well bred as he was, took no real pleasure in the
sports of the company of which he had made a part since the loss of the
position he so desired, and for which he had worked so faithfully. He felt
himself disgraced and barred from the old associates; so, from pure
discouragement, he continued with the new.