MARY LOUISE--MILLINER
With deft fingers Mary Louise fashioned the little bonnet. She had
purchased a piece of fresh white crêpe ruching which she tacked in the
front.
“Now, a lining to keep my huge stitches from showing and there we are!”
she cried.
“Lovely!” gasped Elizabeth. “I don’t see how you did it. I can’t trim a
hat to save me. My mother can’t even trim a hat to look like anything,
although she thinks she can. There is nothing Mother confesses not to
be able to do.”
The girls laughed. Mrs. Wright’s idiosyncrasies were well known to
the group. She was a managing lady who had unbounded faith in her own
prowess and judgment.
“I guess I’ll take the bonnet to the little old lady on my way home,”
suggested Mary Louise. “I’d like to see her try it on.”
“That would be fine,” said Josie, who had been busily engaged all
afternoon with her laundering. “I’d go with you, but this last dozen
napkins must be polished off. Don’t they look lovely and glossy? I just
love to iron. It is such wonderful work to let you think while you are
doing it.”
“Yes, and I’m afraid I’d think scorched places on the fine damask,”
laughed Elizabeth. “What must Mary Louise charge the little old lady?”
“Charge her! Why nothing, goose! Of course, I did it just for the fun
of doing it,” blushed Mary Louise.
“Oh, that would never do,” put in Josie, sternly. “Such a thing would
ruin our trade. In the first place, the little old lady won’t think it
is done right if it is free, and then she would tell other persons that
we do work for nothing but it is not good and, before you know it, we’d
be overrun with charity practice. No indeed, my dear Mary Louise, the
bonnet must be paid for and it must be well paid for. Of course, I have
no idea what it’s worth. What would you have to pay to have such work
done? You know, Irene. Your aunt must have bonnets made.”
“Well, Aunt Hannah did have a bonnet made only last week and it was
not nearly so chic as this one and she furnished all the material and
just the work on it cost four dollars.”
“Heavens! Four dollars! I couldn’t possibly have earned four dollars
in about two hours. Why I could make a living at that rate, even if I
worked only two hours a day. It couldn’t be worth that much!”
“Well, you know perfectly well, Mary Louise, if you were having the
work done, you wouldn’t hesitate to pay twice that much,” scolded
Josie. “You’ve got to put yourself in the other fellow’s place. Just
pretend you need the money and charge what it would be worth to a well
off young person like, say--Mrs. Danny Dexter. You have to pay us a
fifteen per cent commission besides for letting you do the work. That
would only leave you three dollars and forty cents.”
“Oh, what a funny Josie!” laughed Mary Louise. “You know I’m not going
to take any of the money. It would be absurd when I’ve had such a good
time doing the little bonnet.”
“A good workman always has a good time doing his work,” asserted Josie,
who was quite like her father in getting off wise little saws. “You
needn’t keep the money, but you are obliged to take it and give us
sixty cents. Business is business and we want to get other business
from this very same little old lady.”
“I’ll wager she doesn’t have a new bonnet more than every three years,”
said Mary Louise, smiling at Josie’s firm business methods.
“Perhaps not but she has many friends, I am sure, and she will tell
them and they will tell their friends and so forth and so on.”
“How do you know she has a lot of friends?” teased Elizabeth. “You
didn’t see her and Irene and I haven’t told you a thing about her, not
even her name.”
“Why, I could tell by her old bonnet--tell easily enough. Don’t you
know one of the first things a detective studies is the psychology of
clothes? My father thought more of a pair of old shoes found under
the bed of a man who was supposed to have committed a murder than he
did of all the mass of circumstantial evidence the other sleuths were
unearthing. He had the opinion from the beginning that the wearer of
those old shoes had not committed a murder, wasn’t capable of having
committed that particular murder, which was one of these low down,
sneaking murders. He said he might have got angry and knocked a man
down and killed him that way, but a man who walked so straight without
running his heels down at all and who wore out his shoe in a little
round ring under the ball of his foot, evidently not trying to walk
on his tip toes nor yet taking the precaution to have rubber heels to
walk easy, was not a man to deliberately plan a foul, sneaking murder.
He hung on to those shoes and worked up the case with that theory as a
basis and, do you know, he proved the man’s innocence in the face of
all kinds of damning evidence! Link by link he knocked off the chain of
evidence of guilt until the man was free and the proper person indicted
and imprisoned for life.”
“And did the guilty one wear rubber heels and run ’em down and wear off
the toes of his shoes trying to pussyfoot?” asked Mary Louise.
“No! He wore Louis Quinze heels and got so many new shoes there was no
reading character from his shoes. The fact was, he was a she and that
was the reason he is serving a life sentence instead of being hanged.”
“Well all I have to say is you are a very delightful and amusing Josie.
If Elizabeth and Irene will divulge the name and address of the
little old lady who has so many friends, which one can plainly tell by
her old bonnet, then I will take the bonnet there on my way home and
collect the money, sixty cents of which I’ll hand over to the grasping
proprietors of the Higgledy Piggledy Shop.”
Josie smiled to see how much more cheerful her friend was after the
hours spent in making herself useful. She felt too that Mary Louise
was happier in that she had seen Dr. Coles and was to know something
definite concerning her grandfather’s condition. It was also easy
to understand that the determination to make a clean breast of her
troubles to Danny had put new heart into the girl.
“Wait a minute! Let me make out a bill on the Higgledy Piggledy paper,”
suggested Elizabeth. “It takes a hardened shopkeeper to hand in a
parcel and say, ‘Four dollars, please!’ while, if you have a bill with
you, you don’t have to say anything, but just present the bill with an
air of giving an invitation.”
Mary Louise went off carrying the bonnets, old and new, in a neat
parcel.
“It seems real funny,” she said to herself, “actually to have earned
three dollars and forty cents for myself and sixty cents for the
Higgledy Piggledies. I am going to tell Danny about it and he will be
so amused. I believe I’ll take him off tomorrow and treat him to lunch
with my own hard earned funds. I’d tell Grandpa Jim, too, except that
he would be sure to say Danny is not making a living for me and I have
to go out and work my fingers to the bone. Poor Grandpa Jim! Everything
is distorted to him just now in regard to Danny.”
The little old lady turned out to be exactly what Josie had
predicted--a gentle soul who attracted friends. Mary Louise found
her drinking tea with four other old ladies, all of whom examined
the bonnet critically, at all angles, and pronounced favorably upon
its style and workmanship. Mary Louise was devoutly thankful that
none of them could peep beneath the lining and see her huge stitches.
They looked at her curiously. To be sure she did not seem much like a
milliner’s assistant with her handsome duvetyn suit and rich furs, but
her manner was modest and impersonal and, when she produced the bill,
made out in Elizabeth’s best style on the Higgledy Piggledy paper,
the little old lady paid it readily and seemed to think it was very
reasonable and all of the friends seemed to think so too and eagerly
took the address of the Higgledy Piggledy Shop.
“I think I’ll get my year-before-last hat done over,” said one. “It is
so much more suitable than this horrid hat my daughter-in-law insisted
upon my buying.”
“I intend to have a new one made, just like Jane’s,” declared another.
Jane was the name of the little old lady--Mrs. Jane Kellogg.
“But that isn’t fair!” cried another. “Jane doesn’t want a twin.”
“I wouldn’t mind at all,” said Jane gently. “Susan and I used to dress
alike when we were girls. Do you remember, Susan?”
Susan did remember and Mary Louise took her departure with a pleasant
impression of Mrs. Jane Kellogg and her friends drinking tea together,
happily reminiscent of their girlhood.
“There’ll be a lot of bonnets to make for the Higgledy Piggledy Shop
before long,” she said to herself. “I’ll help the girls out some more
and give the money to charity.”