Before the end of her second year in New York, many things, grave and
gay, came to pass. Sarah Farraday came down for a fortnight of operas and
concerts and went home to spread the marvels of Jane's full and glowing
life over the Vermont village; Emma Ellis reluctantly gave up her room at
Mrs. Hills' and became resident superintendent of the Hope House
Settlement, and Michael Daragh took his noon meal there. Jane went home
twice for little visits and found changes even there,--the Teddy-bear,
now trudging sturdily about in rompers, had a small sister, and Nannie
Slade Hunter was prettier than ever, if a trifle too rotund, and Edward
R., very prosperous and pleased with himself, had bought his wife an
electric coupé, in which to take his offspring for a safe and opulent
airing. Martin Wetherby, Assistant Cashier, had somehow put youth aside.
His stoutness had closed in on him like an enemy. His mother admitted to
Jane that he did not take sufficient exercise. "He doesn't seem to ...
care," she said, and looked pointedly away. To herself she put it
dramatically, with great relish; never, to the day of her death, would
she forgive the girl who had ruined her son's life. Jane wished with all
her good-natured heart that Marty would marry, happily and handsomely--it
would be such a relief to have Mrs. Wetherby complacently triumphant
instead of heavily reproachful. And even Sarah Farraday never referred to
him as other than, "Poor old Marty." Jane had her moments of wishing that
they might, in village parlance, "make a match of it," but they were
moments only. Sarah was much too fine; she must find Sarah a suitor of
parts, somehow, somewhere.
It was during the second of her visits home that Miss Lydia Vail died.
There was no dreariness of illness or misery of suffering; she died
exactly as she had lived, plumply and pleasantly, in the plump and
pleasant faith that was hers, and Jane left the middle-aged maid in
charge of the elm-shaded, green-shuttered house and went back to New York
with a grief which was more pensive than poignant. She refused,
thereafter, to rent the old home, but loaned it instead, the servant with
it, to various and sundry of her city clan,--now the girl who had carried
her first playlet to success, now to shabby music students at Mrs. Hills'
whom Sarah Farraday was pledged to regale with tea and cheer in the
afternoons, now to sad-eyed women of Michael Daragh's recommendation.
Sometimes she ran up herself with a little house-party,--down-at-the-heel
vaudevilleans, elderly, concert-going ladies from the boarding house,
Emma Ellis and another settlement worker--and made an expenditure for
food and entertainment which secretly scandalized the ancient maid.
She wrote her first slim little novel which was accepted for serial
publication and Rodney Harrison insisted that there was the germ of a
three-act play in it. She set to work on it and labored harder than ever
before in her life, happily, hot-cheeked, shining-eyed, wrote and rewrote
and clipped and amplified and smoothed and polished, and one day Sarah
Farraday ran over to the Hunter's house with a telegram.
"Nannie! It's accepted! Jane's three-act play is accepted! Did you ever
in all your born days see such luck? She just can't fail!" Her earnest,
blonde face was a little wistful. "I never knew any human being to have
so much!"
Mrs. Edward R. was herding the Teddy-bear into the coupé and she handed
little Sarah Anne to her friend. "Get in, Sally dear, and I'll run you
home. I'm taking the children over to Mother Hunter's for the day." She
steadied Sarah and her burden to a seat and then tucked herself neatly
in, and started her bright vehicle competently. "Well, I don't know....
It's all very fine, of course, but I can think of a good deal she hasn't
got!"
"Oh, of course ..." said the music teacher. After a moment she sighed.
"Poor old Marty.... Well, we can't lead other people's lives for them,
can we?"
"No, we can't," Mrs. Edward R. admitted, contentedly. She bowled Sarah
smoothly back to the burlapped studio in time for the eleven-twenty
pupil.
* * * * *
Jane, meanwhile, after wiring to Sarah, flew to Michael Daragh with her
joyful tidings and lunched with him and Emma Ellis at Hope House. The
Irishman, who had read the little play and knew its clean verve and
charm, was radiant for her, and the superintendent managed grudging
congratulations. They were in the sitting room after the meal, and
something seemed to smite Jane, swiftly, with regard to Emma Ellis; her
bright eyes traveled over the whole of her,--the shabby hair, the hot and
steaming face, the moist fingers with their dull and shapeless
nails,--the needlessly cruel ugliness of blouse and skirt and shoes; the
utter unloveliness of her. As on the day of her return from Three
Meadows, when Emma Ellis had supposed Michael Daragh had met her at the
train, again her heart melted to mercy within her. Oh, the poor thing!
The _poor_ thing----
"Miss Ellis, I've taken your chair, haven't I?"
"It doesn't matter where I sit, Miss Vail. This one does well enough for
me," she answered, virtuously.
Jane sat down on a footstool near the window. "Do take it--not that
there's any cloying luxury, even there! Is it in the constitution of Hope
House to have only hideous and uncomfortable furniture?"
"You cannot know much about this sort of work, Miss Vail, or you'd
realize that our funds are always limited, and that we must conserve them
for necessities." It was a depressingly warm day, and the superintendent
felt it and showed it, and she reflected bitterly that Jane Vail was the
sort of person who was warm and glowing in January, when normal people
were pinched and blue, and cool and crisp in September, when those who
had to keep right on working, no matter what the weather was, had pools
of perspiration under their eyes and shirtwaists adhering gummily to
their backs. And she always wore things in summer which gave out cunning
suggestions of shady brooksides, and managed--in that theatrical way of
hers--the effect of bringing a breeze in with her.
"I wonder," said Jane, "if my silly little paper people get the breath of
life blown into them and my play goes over and I have regal royalties, if
I couldn't do something for Hope House?"
"You could, indeed, God save you kindly for the thought," said Michael
Daragh, happily. "If your play'll run to it, you could be buying us two
bathtubs and----"
"The linoleum in the kitchen"--Miss Ellis forgot her bitterness for a
moment--"is simply in shreds!"
"I will not!" said Jane, crisply. "Bathtubs and linoleum, indeed! Wring
them out of your Board! I shall give you a Sleepy Hollow couch with
bide-a-wee cushions, and deep, cuddly armchairs and a lamp or two
with shades as mellow as autumn woods! And some perfectly frivolous
pictures which aren't in the least inspiring or uplifting,--and every
single girl's room shall have a _pink pincushion_!" Then at their
blankness, she softened. "Oh, very well,--you shall have your tubs and
your linoleum, if you'll let me humanize the rest of the house,--will
you?" She came to her feet with a spring of incredible energy. "Come
along, Miss Ellis,--let's have a look upstairs! We don't need you,
M.D.--this is woman-stuff."
The superintendent pulled herself upstairs with a sticky hand on the
banister, "Well, I don't know where you'd begin, Miss Vail. Everything's
threadbare...."
They went through drab halls and into drab rooms where drab occupants
greeted them drably, and Jane ached with the ugliness of it. Wasn't it
going to be fun--_if_ the play went over "big"--to vanquish this much of
the hideousness of the world?
She stopped before a closed door. "What is this?"
Miss Ellis was walking past it. "That's my room."
"Well, may I see it?"
"Oh," she said, colorlessly, "I didn't suppose you'd want to fix _it_
over...." She opened the door and stepped in, crossing to the undraped
window and running up the stiff shade of faded and streaked olive green.
"But of course I shall," said Jane, following her in. "Well--I might
have known!"
"What?" asked Miss Ellis, defensively.
"That you'd take the smallest and shabbiest room in the house for
yourself."
"Oh, well ... it doesn't matter. I'm not in it very much." She walked
over to the warped golden oak bureau and straightened the metal button
hook with the name of a shoe shop pressed into it into line with the
whisk broom. Besides these two articles there bloomed upon the bureau's
top a small pincushion made from a piece of California redwood bark, and
a widowed saucer enrolled as a pin-tray, and into the frame of the mirror
was stuck a snapshot of an unnecessarily plain small boy.
"That's my little nephew," said Emma Ellis, seeing Jane's eye upon it.
"My sister Bertha's boy."
"He--he looks _bright_, doesn't he?" said Jane, hastily. She looked
about her, consideringly. "You know, I'd like to do this room in deep
creamy yellow. That will make it look lighter and seem larger, and it
will be nice with your hair."
"My hair?..." said Miss Ellis, limply.
"You have such nice hair, but I do wish you'd do it differently," said
Jane with anxious friendliness. "You have a _mile_ of it, haven't you?"
The superintendent's tucked-in lips and her whole taut figure visibly
relaxed. "I _used_ to have nice hair," she admitted in the time-hallowed
formula. "I wish you could have seen it four years ago. It's come out
something terrible! Well," she made a virtue of it--"I never spend any
time fussing with it."
"But you ought to, you know! Let me play with it a minute, will you? I
adore doing hair. Please sit down--I just want to try something with
it--something I thought of as I watched you to-day." She pressed her into
a stiff chair.
"Well ..." said Miss Ellis grudgingly. She produced a comb from a bleakly
neat top drawer.
"Heavens, what neatness," said Jane. "And the brush, please! You ought to
give it a hundred and twenty strokes a night,--see, like this? No, it
wouldn't be wasting time! Just consider the good thoughts you could be
thinking. You could memorize poetry or dates in history or say your
prayers,--and you'd say a prayer of thankfulness in a year, when you
looked at the result. It would shine like patent leather." Her fingers
flew. "There! Now you can look. See how it brings out the good lines of
your face? Wait,--where's your hand mirror? You haven't one? My word!
Well, you can get the idea, even so! Will you try doing it this way? It
won't take but a minute longer. Just to please me?"
"Well ..." she couldn't seem to think of anything else to say, and she
had a ridiculous feeling that she might be going to cry.
"And--do you mind my saying these things?--I've always bullied my friends
about their clothes and colors--I do wish you wouldn't wear white, and
navy blue."
"I always supposed _white_ was right for every one."
"It's wicked for most people! Cream, buff, tan, apricot, burnt
orange--Let me come down and go shopping with you some day, will you? I
never cared about dressing dolls but I revel in dressing people."
"Well ..." said Miss Ellis once more, and this time her stubborn chin
quivered.
"Shall we go downstairs?" Jane moved ahead of her, her eyes averted, her
voice cheerfully commonplace. "Simply torrid up here, isn't it? I'll come
some cool morning, and we'll make lists and plans--_if_ my play goes
over----"
But before her gay little play had been running three months, picking up
speed like a motor as it ran--she had kept her word to Hope House. She
became the Lady Bountiful of the bathtubs and linoleums, of the frivolous
lay pictures and the autumn shaded lamps, and she wrote impudently to
Sarah Farraday that when she looked upon all that she had created she saw
that it was very good.
Even Emma Ellis has undergone a sea change; she's learned to do her
hair decently, and I've actually persuaded her that while it's quite
right to let her light so shine before men, it's different with her
nose, and you can't think what a dusting of flesh-colored powder does
for her! And I've got her out of blue serge and white blouses, and
into cream and buff and orange and brown, and I daresay Michael
Daragh will now fall in love with her excellent qualities and her
enhanced appearance, and I shall lose my best friend. (E.E. would
never allow friendships.) I shall probably wish I'd left her in her
state of Ugly Ducklingness, for I simply can't spare St. Michael from
my scheme of things!