Judith Scores Again
The house party at Buck Hill was not proving the great success that
Mildred and Nan had hoped for. All of the elements of pleasure and
gaiety were present but to the anxious hostesses the affair seemed to
drag somewhat. In the first place, brother Jeff utterly refused to
fall in love with their prize guest and the prize guest, being
accustomed to conquest, was peevish in consequence. Not that Jeff was
in the least rude. On the contrary, he was especially polite and
charming to all of his sisters' friends, fetching and carrying for
them, dancing with them, playing tennis with the athletic, talking
sentimental nothings with the romantic, and gravely discussing the
Einstein theory with the high-brows. He did everything that was
required of him but fall in love with Jean Roland.
The young people were gathered at one end of the long piazza. At the
other end sat Miss Ann Peyton and Mrs. Bucknor. Miss Ann was engaged
in her favorite occupation of crocheting thread lamp-mats and Mrs.
Bucknor vainly endeavoring to get to the bottom of the family stocking
basket. The forenoon is always a difficult period in which to
entertain a house party. It seems almost impossible to start anything,
at least so Mildred and Nan felt. Even the most frivolously inclined
do not want to flirt in the morning.
Everybody was feeling a little dull, perhaps from having eaten more
breakfast than is usual in this day and generation, but Buck Hill held
to the custom of olden times of much and varied food with which to
start the day. One can't be very lively after shad roe, liver and
bacon, hot rolls and corn cakes all piled on top of strawberries and
cream, and the whole washed down with coffee.
Jean Roland smothered a yawn, a deliberate yawn--not the kind you
can't repress because the air is close and you feel like a goldfish
when the water in the bowl has not been changed and you must gape for
breath. The fat boy had been dancing attendance on her for the last
hour and she was wearied with his witty sallies. Jeff and Willis
Truman, a former classmate, had started a game of bridge with two of
the more serious-minded girls.
"Bridge is one of the things I can't play," Jean had announced, and
it was hardly complimentary that the game was being played in spite of
her.
"By the way, Jeff, you know the Titian-haired queen you were so taken
up with at the station last evening that you couldn't greet your
guests?" asked Tom Harbison. "I saw her again this morning."
"That little country person!" exclaimed Jean Roland. "No style at all
to her."
"Not a particle!" echoed Nan.
"Oh, that little cousin of ours?" said Jeff, pausing in his game.
"Jeff, how can you?" cried Mildred. "She's a very common person who
happens to be named Buck and now they are trumping up some foolish old
tale that they were Bucknors 'way back yonder in the middle ages and
that they are related to us. It is too ridiculous for words."
"Our kin all the same," teased Jeff, going on with his game.
"Right fetching skirt!" said Tom. "She was flirting with some men on
the hotel porch when we drove by this morning. I reckon they were all
cousins, too."
Jeff looked up from his game with a gleam of anger in his eye. He lost
track of the cards, got confused, played from the wrong hand, blocked
himself from a re-entry and promptly got set. All because Tom Harbison
intimated that Judith Buck was not conducting herself with propriety.
"Here comes somebody! I saw a car turn in from the pike," announced
Nan. "I hope it isn't any more company."
The attention of everyone was focused on the approaching vehicle. It
was Judith's little blue car, skimming down the avenue with the usual
speed exacted of it by its stern young mistress, who seemed bent on
getting at least thirty-six hours out of the twenty-four. No one could
have said she did not have style in her manner of turning a curve and
neatly landing at the yard gate.
"Speak of the devil," muttered Mildred, "if it isn't that Judith Buck.
What on earth can she want?"
Judith, with her usual expedition, was out of the car and with sample
case in hand was through the gate and half way up the walk before any
one attempted to answer Mildred's query.
"Come to see your brother, perhaps," suggested Jean Roland.
"Ah, be a sister to me," sighed the fat boy, "please be a sister to
me, Mildred."
Judith faltered not a moment, but marched straight up the steps. The
young men all jumped from their seats and Jeff came forward with
outstretched hand, but the girl pretended not to see the gesture. With
a businesslike "Good-morning," she proceeded to open up her sample
case and begin her salesman's patter: "I have here--" She was
determined that the call should be purely a commercial one and that
the Bucknors could none of them think for a moment that she sought or
even desired any social dealings with them.
"Perhaps you had better take your wares to the back door. The servants
may want to buy some," suggested Mildred, with more insolence than her
family dreamed she was capable of showing.
"Thank you. A little later on I shall take advantage of your kind
suggestion. I have a line of wares especially put up for back doors.
These things I have been telling you about are intended for front
doors. Unlike most of the companies who have similar goods on the
market, this one allows the agent to deliver the article the moment
the sale is made," Judith continued in her salesman's manner. "I have
a complete stock of goods in my car and while I sell by sample you do
not have to wait for days and weeks to enjoy the really excellent
bargains I am enabled to offer you. This now is a cleansing cream. No
matter how clean you may think your face is, you will find after
applying this you are vastly mistaken. Yes, disconcerting for the
moment but comforting when you realize how much cleaner you are to be
than your neighbor."
The young people had gathered around her and even Miss Ann Peyton and
Mrs. Bucknor put down their work and came to see what Judith had to
sell.
"Will any one of you young ladies let me prove the value of this cream
by applying it to the countenance?"
"Anoint me," suggested the fat boy.
"Oh, no, this is intended solely for ladies. I have a masculine brand
to which I am coming later. I will give a sample jar to any one who
will let me demonstrate on her."
Judith's manner was businesslike and impersonal, but her color was
heightened by excitement that she was determined not to show.
"Why don't you try it on yourself?" said Nan. "I bet yours will come
off, all right."
Judith dipped her fingers in the jar and daubed her glowing cheek with
the cleansing cream. Everybody laughed. "And now while we leave this
cream on for a minute or two I will endeavor to interest you in my
various powders." She gave an animated recommendation of powders from
talcum to insect.
"And now we will see the miraculous powers of the cleansing cream."
She took a handkerchief from her pocket and after a vigorous rubbing
of the anointed cheek submitted the evidence to the audience.
"That is excellent," said Mrs. Bucknor. "Let me have a jar."
Next Judith demonstrated the virtues of a vanishing cream and made
several sales. Then the men must be told of an excellent shaving soap
and healing powder. Scented soaps of all kinds were then displayed,
shampoos, hair tonics, pocket combs, tooth brushes and paste.
The lassitude which had held the house party in thrall was dispelled.
It was almost as though Judith had applied a cleansing fluid to the
atmosphere. She stood in their midst, displaying her wares with an
earnestness and simplicity that was most convincing. Who could help
but buy from the girl?
Miss Ann looked at her long and searchingly. So this was the girl that
old Billy thought resembled his mistress. Her thoughts went back to
her girlhood. When she was the age of this Judith could she have so
demeaned herself as to go around peddling cosmetics and soaps?
Certainly not! She would have starved before she would have stooped to
such an occupation. Starved! What did she know about starving? The
morning she had gone away from Cousin Betty Throckmorton's without her
breakfast was the first time in her life she had ever missed a meal.
Visitors in the blue-grass regions of Kentucky are not apt to be
hungry. Would it have been better if, when she was young and strong,
she, too, had endeavored to help herself instead of visiting,
eternally visiting?
All of this flashed through the old lady's mind. Suppose there had
been no cousins and aunts and uncles to visit--what then? Suppose she
had been as this girl was, with no relations on whom she might depend
for assistance. Suppose her relations had been poor. Suppose they had
not wanted her. Not wanted her! Did they want her? Did anybody want
her? So intently did she gaze on Judith's face that the girl's eyes
were drawn in the direction of the old lady. Miss Ann would have liked
to buy some of the toilet articles, but the quarterly allowance from
her small estate was not due for many days and never was there money
enough for her to indulge herself in the kind of wares Judith offered
for sale. For a moment Judith stopped her salesman's patter and gazed
into the eyes of Cousin Ann Peyton.
"Poor old lady!" was her thought. "It must be terrible to be old and
idle. I wish I could do something for her just to let her know I like
her. I believe I might even love her."
The sales had been larger than Judith in her fondest dreams had
imagined they could be. Even the scornful Mildred purchased a few
things that took her fancy and the young men, one and all, remembered
they were sadly in need of shaving cream and tooth brushes, or if they
were not in immediate need it was just as well to lay in a supply.
There was much laughing and talking and badinage, but through it all
Judith held herself with a certain poise that gave all of the buyers
to understand that she was merely the store-keeper and did not wish to
be regarded in any other light.
Jeff was singularly silent while Judith was crying up her wares. He
stood moodily aside, looking on but never offering to purchase shaving
cream or other masculine requirements. He wished she had not come. He
resented her placing herself in a position for all of these wretched
persons to patronize her. He hated the look on Tom Harbison's face as
he edged closer and closer to the girl, insisting upon putting down
his name for one of every article offered for sale.
Judith, however, was so bent on being a salesman that she was
absolutely unaware of the admiration she had evidently created in the
eyes of young Harbison. When she went to her car to get the wares
stored in the back it was Harbison who sprang forward to assist her.
Jeff watched the couple as they went down the walk to the yard gate
and a suppressed fury gripped him when he noticed that Tom was much
closer to Judith than was necessary. He knew perfectly well that Tom
Harbison always walked too close to any girl, and had a habit of
leaning over any member of the fair sex with a protecting air,
occasionally touching her elbow as though to assist her over anything,
even so small as a pebble, that might be in her way. When they reached
the yard gate one might have supposed a dragon threatened the ladye
faire, so solicitous was his manner, so brave his bearing.
Jeff could stand it no longer. He ran down the steps and with long
strides arrived in time to assist the supposedly helpless maiden.
"I want to help you," he said shortly.
"That's very kind, but really the things are not heavy," and Judith
began busily picking out the articles from the back of her car and
putting them in a basket.
But Jeff had come to help, and help he would. He assumed a cousinly
air that put Tom Harbison's courtliness entirely in the shade. If any
protecting was to be done he, Jeff Bucknor, was going to do it. He was
the proper person to carry the basket of toilet articles as heir
apparent to Buck Hill and an avowed kinsman of the lady. He even
managed to crowd Harbison from the walk as, with basket in one hand,
he protected the astonished Judith with the other. When the back-door
customers were visited, the young master insisted upon accompanying
Judith, and there he stood guard while she talked concerning the
virtues of her anti-kink lotion and scented soaps.
She wished he would leave her for a moment, as she had a little
private business to transact with Uncle Billy, but he stuck closer
than any brother was ever known to stick and she must let him see her
hand to the old man a package, saying:
"Please, Uncle Billy, give this to Miss Ann Peyton and tell her it is
from a sincere admirer. It is just a bottle of lavender water, but I
thought she might like it."
Uncle Billy bowed so low that his beard almost touched the ground.
"Thank you, thank you, missy! I been a sayin' that you air the onlies'
one in the whole county what kin hol a can'le to what my Miss Ann wa'
in ol' days--an' air now fer that matter."