A QUEER GIFT
True to her promise Roberta had gone on the following afternoon to assist
her new friends to prepare for their voyage, but to her amazement she
found that they had departed, but the janitress living in the basement
was on the watch for the girl and at once she ascended the stone stairs
and inquired: "Are you Miss Dolittle?"
Bobs replied that she was, and the large woman, in a manner which plainly
told that she had a message of importance to convey, whispered
mysteriously, "Wait here!"
Down into the well of a stairway she disappeared, soon to return with an
envelope containing something hard, which felt as though it might be a
key.
This it proved to be. The writing in the letter had been painstakingly
made, but the language was not English, and Bobs looked at it with so
frankly puzzled an expression that the woman, who had been standing near,
watching curiously, asked: "Can I read it for you?"
Strange things surely had happened since the Vandergrifts had gone to the
East Side to live, but this was the strangest of all. It was hard for
Roberta to believe that she heard aright. The old man had written that
his entire stock was worth no more than five hundred dollars, and since
Roberta had procured more than that sum for him, he was making her a gift
of the books that remained, and requested that she remove them at once,
as the rent on the shop would expire the following day.
The janitress, with an eye to business, at once said that her son, Jacob,
was idle and could truck the books for the young lady wherever she wished
them to go. It was two o'clock in the afternoon when this conversation
took place, and at five o'clock Gloria and Lena May, returning from the
Settlement House, were amazed to see a skinny horse drawing a two-wheeled
ash cart stopping at the curb in front of the Pensinger mansion. The
driver was a Hebrew lad, but at his side sat no less a personage than
Roberta, who beamed down upon her astonished sisters.
After a moment of explanation the three girls assisted the boy Jacob to
cart all the books to one of the unoccupied upper rooms, and when he had
driven away Roberta sank down upon a kitchen chair and laughed until she
declared that she ached. Lena May, busy setting the table for supper,
merrily declared: "Bobs, what a girl you are to have adventures. Here
Glow and I have been on the East Side just as long as you have, and
nothing unusual has happened to us."
"Give it time," Roberta remarked as she rose to wash her hands. "But now
I seem to have had a new profession thrust upon me. Glow, how would it do
to open an old book shop out on the front lawn?"
"I'll prophesy that these books will fill a good need some day, perhaps,
when we're least expecting it," was Gloria's reply.
Then, as they sat eating their evening meal together and watching the
afterglow of the sunset on the river, that was so near their front door,
at last Bobs said: "Do see those throngs of poor tired-out women trooping
from the factory. Now they will go to the Settlement House and get their
children, go home and cook and wash and iron and darn and--" she paused,
then added, "How did we four girls ever manage to live so near all this
and know nothing about it? I feel as though I had been the most selfish,
useless, good-for-nothing----"
"Here, here, young lady. I won't allow you to call my sister such hard
names," Glow said merrily as she rose to replenish their cups of hot
chocolate. Then, more seriously, she added as she reseated herself:
"Losing our home seemed hard, but I do believe that we three are glad
that something happened to make us of greater use in the world."
"I am," Lena May said, looking up brightly. She was thinking of the
sandpile at the Settlement House over which she had presided that
afternoon.
And Gloria concluded: "I know that I would be more nearly happy than I
have been since our mother died, if only I knew where Gwendolyn is."
And where was Gwendolyn, the proud, selfish girl who had not tried to
make the best of things? Gloria would indeed have been troubled had she
but known.