In spite of the bright lights illuminating the windows of the M. O. R.
house--and many other larger and finer houses at that end of Whiffle
Street--outside it was dark and dreary enough. Especially was this so at
the "poverty-stricken end," as Josephine Morse called her section of the
street. Jess and her widowed mother lived on the fringe of the wealthy
Hill district, where Whiffle Street develops an elbow, suddenly becomes
narrow, and debouches upon Market Street.
It was raining, too. Not an honest, splashing downpour, but a drizzling,
half-hearted rain that drifted about the streets as though ashamed of
itself, leaving a deposit of slime on all the crosswalks, and making the
corner street-lamps weep great tears. The gas-lamps, too, seemed in a
fog and struggled feebly against the blackness of the evening.
Under a huge umbrella which snuffed her almost like a candle, Jess had
made her way into Market Street and to Mr. Closewick's grocery store
near the corner. She carried a basket on her arm and she had given the
clerk rather a long list of necessary things, although she had studied
to make the quantities as modest as possible. The clerk had put them all
up now and packed them into the basket and stood expectantly with the
list checked off in his hand.
"Two dollars and seven cents, Miss Jess," he said.
"I'll have to ask you to add that to our bill," said the girl, flushing.
"Mother is short of money just now."
"Wait a moment, Miss Jess; I'll speak to Mr. Closewick," said the clerk,
seemingly as much embarrassed as the girl herself, and he stepped
hastily toward the glass-enclosed office at the rear of the store.
But the pursy old man with the double chin and spectacles on his
forehead, the height of which the wisp of reddish-gray hair could not
hide, had observed it all. He got down ponderously from his stool and
squeaked out behind the long counter in his shiny boots.
"I sent my bill over to your mother this morning, Miss Jess," he said.
"It is more than twenty dollars without this list of goods to-night,"
and he shook the modest little paper in his hand, having taken it from
the clerk.
"Mother is short of money just now," repeated Jess.
"So'm I. You tell her so. I can't let you increase your indebtedness,"
and his pudgy hand lifted the basket and put it on the shelf behind him.
"You pay me something on account, or pay for these goods you've ordered
this evening. I'm needing money, too."
"Mr. Closewick! I hope you won't do that," gasped Jess, paling under his
stern glance. "We will pay you--we always have. Mother sometimes has to
wait for her money--a long time. We spend many a twenty-dollar bill in
your store during the year----"
"That ain't neither here nor there," said the grocer, ponderously. "It's
a rule I have. Never let a bill run more than twenty dollars. 'Specially
where there's no man in the family. Hard to collect from a woman. Makes
me bad friends if I press 'em. I can afford to risk losing twenty
dollars; but no more!"
"How can you!" cried Jess, under her breath, for there was somebody else
entering the store. "We have bought of you for years----"
"And if I hadn't stuck to the few business rules I have, I wouldn't have
been here selling you goods for years," returned Mr. Closewick, grimly.
"The sheriff would have sold me out. I'm sorry for your mother, and I
don't want to lose her trade. But business is business."
"And you cannot favor us for this single occasion?" choked Jess.
"It would lead to others; I can't break a rule," said the grocer,
stubbornly. "Come now, Miss Jess! You go home and tell your mother how
it is. I'll keep this basket right here for you, and you come back with
the two-seven, and it will be all right."
"That would be useless," said Jess, clinging to the counter for support,
and feeling for the moment as though she should sink, "We haven't any
money--at present. If we had I should not have asked you for any
extension of credit. Please give me back my basket."
"So?" returned the grocer, frowning. "Very well," and he deliberately
unpacked the parcels and handed her the basket--making a show of so
doing in the presence of the newly arrived customer. "And what can I do
for _you_, this evening, Mrs. Brown?" he asked, blandly, speaking to the
new arrival while he handed Jess her basket without a word.
"And that woman will tell about it all over town!" thought the girl, as
she hurried into the street. "Oh, dear, dear! whatever shall I do?"
For the cupboard at the Morse cottage was very bare indeed. Mrs. Mary
Morse had some little standing as a contributor to the more popular
magazines; but the returns from her pen-work being her entire means of
income, there were sometimes weary waitings for checks. Jess had been
used to these unpleasant occasions ever since she was a very little
girl. Her mother was of a nervous temperament and easily disturbed; and
as Jess had grown she had tried to shield her mother, at these times of
famine, from its most unpleasant features.
As witness her passage-at-arms with the grocer, Mr. Closewick. No money
in the house, an empty pantry, their credit cut off at the store where
they had always traded, and no credit established at any other grocer's
shop! The situation looked desperate, indeed, to Jess Morse.
Jess shrank from trying the butcher's and the dairy store, too. At each
shop an unpaid bill would stare her in the face and to-night she felt as
though each proprietor would demand a "payment on account." It was a
black night indeed. November was going out in its very mournfullest and
dismallest manner.
And for Jess Morse there was an added burden of disappointment and
trouble. She was not able to attend the M. O. R. reception, although she
was a member. Laura Belding, her very dearest friend, would be there and
would wonder why she, Jess, did not appear. And after the reception Chet
Belding, Laura's brother, would be waiting to take Jess home--she hadn't
had the heart to tell Chet that she would not need his escort from the
reception.
But, as Jess had told her mother, that blue party dress had become
impossible. Let alone its being months behind the fashion, it was frayed
around the bottom and the front breadth was sorely stained. And she
hadn't another gown fit to put on in the evening. She did so long for
something to wear at a party in which her friends would not know her two
blocks away. So she had "cut" the reception at the M. O. R. house.
All this was a heavy load on Jess Morse's mind as she approached, with
hesitating steps, the butter and egg shop kept by Mr. Vandergriff.
"Certainly," thought the troubled girl, "I either need a whole lot of
courage, or a lot of money--either would come in very handy to-night."
Just then Jess was aroused from her brown study by hearing somebody
calling breathlessly after her.
"Hi! Hi! Aren't you going to look around? Jess Morse!"
A girl smaller than herself, and dressed from neck to heels in a
glistening raincoat, ran under Jess's umbrella and seized her arm. She
was a laughing, curly-haired girl with dancing black eyes and an
altogether roguish look.
"Jess Morse! don't you ever look back on the street--no matter what
happens?" she demanded.
"For what was Lot's wife turned to salt, Bobby?" returned Jess,
solemnly.
"For good! Now you know, don't you?" laughed Clara Hargrew, whose
youthful friends knew her as "Bobby."
"Why aren't you at the 'big doin's' to-night," demanded the harum-scarum
Bobby. "You're a Mother of the Republic; what means this delinquency?"
"Just supposing I had something else to do?" returned Jess, trying to
speak lightly. "I'm on an errand now."
She wished to shake Bobby off. She dared not take her into Mr.
Vandergriff's store. Suppose the butter and egg man should treat her as
the grocer had?
"Say! you ought to be up there," cried the unconscious Bobby. "I just
came past the house and it was all lit up like--like a hotel. And Mr.
Sharp was just coming out with Mrs. Kerrick. Mrs. Kerrick is going to do
something big for us girls of Central High."
"What do you mean?" asked Jess, only half interested in Bobby's gossip.
"Going to give us a chance to win a prize, or something," pursued Bobby.
"Oh! how do you know?" Jess showed more interest now.
"Why, I heard Mr. Sharp say, as he was helping Mrs. Kerrick into Colonel
Swayne's auto:
"'The girls of Central High should be delighted, Mrs. Kerrick--and very
grateful to you, indeed. Two hundred dollars! And a chance for any smart
girl to win it!'--just like that. Now, Jess, you and I are both smart
girls, aren't we?" demanded Bobby, roguishly.
"We think we are, at any rate," returned Jess, more eagerly. "Two
hundred dollars! Oh! wouldn't that be fine!"
"It would buy a lot of candy and ice-cream sodas," chuckled Bobby.
But to herself Jess Morse thought: "And it would mean the difference,
for mother and me, between penury and independence! Oh, dear me! is it
something that I can do to earn two hundred dollars?"
And she listened to Bobby's surmises about the mysterious prize without
taking in half what the younger girl was saying. Two hundred dollars!
And she and her mother did not have a cent. She looked up and saw the
lights of the butter and egg store just ahead, and sighed.