Forgetful of everything disagreeable, Hope stood in her corner for the
last time, softly humming the sweet little strain she had heard from the
good little fiddle. She was earlier than usual,--ten, fifteen minutes
earlier. "Tum, tum, ti tum," she was softly humming, when--
"Do you stay here all day?" asked a clear, confident voice. She turned
her head, and there stood that girl,--Dolly Dering.
"No," answered Hope, politely, to this question, but with a coldness and
distance of manner that was meant to check all further questioning. But
Dolly Dering wasn't easily checked.
"My sister says that you live in Riverview, and that you get your
flowers in Riverview woods," was her next questioning remark.
"Yes."
"What other kinds of flowers are you going to sell when these arbutus
are gone?"
"I'm not going to sell any."
"Why not?"
"Because I--I don't want to."
"I should think you would. You must make a lot of money."
No answer.
"To be sure, I don't suppose you'd make so much with garden flowers, but
there are ever so many kinds of wild flowers coming on by and by, aren't
there?"
"I suppose so."
"Perhaps you go to school, do you?"
"Yes."
"Oh! and this is vacation week at the public schools; that's why you can
be here. I see. What you earn must be a great help, isn't it?"
Hope's patience and dignity were giving way. She looked up with a fiery
glance.
"A great help in what?" she asked.
"Why, why, in your home, you know,--in buying bread and things,--you
know what I mean."
"Yes, I know what you mean," burst forth Hope. "You mean that you think
because I am selling flowers here in the station that I belong to poor
people, who live anyhow,--poor, ignorant people, who are helped by the
missions and the unions,--poor, ignorant people like those at the North
End."
Dolly Dering stared with all her might at the flushed, excited face
before her.
"Why--why--you _are_ poor, aren't you, or you wouldn't be selling things
like this?" she blunderingly asked.
Hope, in her turn, stared back at Dolly. Then in a vehement, exasperated
tone, she said,--
"I didn't think anybody _could_ be so ignorant as you are."
"I! ignorant! well!" exclaimed Dolly, in astonishment and rising
resentment.
"Yes, ignorant," went on Hope, recklessly, "or you'd know more about the
difference in people. You'd _see_ the difference. You'd see that I
didn't belong to the kind of poor folks who live any way and anyhow. My
father is John Benham, an engineer on this road, and we have a nice
home, and plenty to eat and drink and to wear,--and books and magazines
and papers," she added, with a sudden instinct that these were the most
convincing proofs of the comfort and respectability of her home.
"What do you sell flowers on the street for, then, if you are as nice as
all that?" cried Dolly, now thoroughly aroused by Hope's words and
manner.
"Because I wanted to buy something for myself that my father couldn't
afford to buy. Don't you ever want anything that your father doesn't
feel as if he could buy for you just when you wanted him to?"
"Well, if I did, I shouldn't be let to go out on the street and peddle
flowers to earn the money," replied Dolly, with what she meant to be
withering emphasis.
"And I shouldn't be _allowed_ to say 'let to go,' like ignorant North
Enders," retorted Hope, with still more withering emphasis.
Dolly reddened with mortification and anger; then she said haughtily, "I
don't happen to know as much as you seem to, how ignorant North Enders
talk."
"No; I told you that you were ignorant, and didn't know the difference
between people."
"How dare you talk like this to me! You are the most impudent girl I
ever saw," cried Dolly, passionately.
"Impudent! How did _you_ dare to speak to me as you did,--to ask me
questions? You didn't know me; you never saw me before. You wouldn't
have dared to speak to a girl that you thought was like yourself. But
you thought you could speak to _me_. You needn't be polite to a girl who
was selling things on the street."
Hope stopped breathless. Her lips were dry; her heart was beating in
hard, quick throbs. As for Dolly she was for the moment silenced, for
Hope had divined the exact state of her mind. Other things, too, had
silenced Dolly for the moment, and these were the evidences of
respectability that Hope had enumerated. She was also faced by these
evidences in Hope's speech and manner, as those fiery but not vulgar
words were poured forth from the dry, tremulous lips; and the effect had
been confusing and disturbing to those fixed ideas about working-people
that had taken root in her--Dolly's--mind. She was not a bad girl at
heart, was this Dolly. She was like a great many people without keen
perception or sensibility, and thoughtless from this very lack. The
youngest of a prosperous family, she had been petted and pampered until
her natural wilfulness and high spirits had made her heedless and
over-confident. She had not meant to insult Hope. She had meant simply
to satisfy her curiosity; and she thought that it was a perfectly proper
thing to satisfy this curiosity about a poor girl who sold flowers on
the street, by asking this girl plain questions, such as she had heard
her mother ask the poor people who came to get work or to beg. But
Hope's plain answers had at first astonished, then angered, then
enlightened her.
In the little breathless pause that followed Hope's last words, the two
girls regarded each other with a strange mixture of feeling. Hope's
feeling was that of relief tinctured with triumph, for she saw that she
had made an impression upon "that ignorant girl." Dolly, humiliated but
not humble, had a queer struggle with her temper and her sense of
justice. She had been made to see that she was partly, if not wholly, in
the wrong, and that she had wounded Hope to the quick. In another minute
she would have blunderingly made some admission of this,--have said to
Hope that she was sorry if she had hurt her feelings, or something to
that effect,--if Hope herself had not suddenly remarked in a tone of
cold dislike,--
"If you are waiting to ask any more questions, I might as well tell you
it's of no use. I sha'n't answer any more; so if you'll please to go
away from this corner and stop staring at me, I shall be much obliged to
you."
Scarlet with anger, all her better impulses scattered to the winds,
Dolly flashed out,--
"You're an ugly, impudent, hateful thing, and I don't care if I _have_
hurt your feelings, so there!"
It happened that John Benham had exchanged his hours of work for that
day with a fellow engineer on the 5.30 train that came out from Boston.
Dolly, watching the train as it came to a stop at the Brookside station,
saw something that interested her greatly. It was an exchange of glances
between that "ugly, impudent, hateful thing" and the engineer, as he
stood in his cab.
"So that is her father, is it,--that smutty workman! She'd better set
herself up and talk about her nice home!" was Dolly's inward comment out
of the wrath that was raging within her.
"What is the matter with Dolly?" asked Mr. Dering, fifteen minutes
later, as Dolly, red and pouting, and with a fierce little frown
wrinkling her forehead, sat in unusual silence beside him on the front
seat of the carriage. Matter? and Dolly, finding her tongue, poured
forth the story of her grievance. With all her faults, Dolly was not
deceitful or untruthful; and the story she told was remarkably exact,
neither glossing over her own words, nor her humiliating defeat through
Hope's cleverness of speech.
Mr. Dering seemed to find the whole story very amusing, and at the end
of it laughingly remarked: "I don't think you had the best of it,
Dolly."
Her mother, from the back seat, was mortified and shocked that Dolly
should have been so vulgar as to quarrel on the street.
"But Dolly began it by asking such questions," spoke up Mary Dering.
"Dolly is such a rattler. I'm sure that flower-girl would never have
spoken to her first."
Then Mrs. Dering wanted to know what Mary knew about "that flower-girl,"
and Mary described Hope as she had seen her.
"She said her father was an engineer on this road, did she?" asked Mr.
Dering, turning to Dolly.
"Yes, papa."
"It must be John Benham. He is one of the best engineers on this
road,"--Mr. Dering was one of the Directors of the road,--"yes, it must
be Benham. I should think he might have just such a child as that."
"Why, papa?" asked Mary Dering, leaning forward.
"Well, because he's a proud sort of fellow, rather short of speech;
doesn't give or take any familiar words. But he's an excellent engineer,
excellent, and is full of intelligent ideas. He saved the road from
quite a loss last year by a suggestion of his. He's always tinkering,
I've been told, on one or another of these ideas,--has quite an
inventive faculty, I believe; and some of these days I suppose he hopes,
as so many of these fellows do, to make a fortune out of some invention.
Hey, what do you say to that, Dolly?" turning from this graver talk, and
pulling one of Dolly's black locks. "What do you say to your impudent
little girl turning into a millionaire's daughter one of these days?"
"I'd say 'Ten cents a bunch' to her!" cried Dolly, vindictively.
Mr. Dering flung back his head, and laughed.
"Do you _really_ think he may make a fortune in that way?" asked Mary,
interestedly.
"Well, no; really I don't, Mary," her father replied. "Such things don't
happen very frequently. Most skilled mechanics, like Benham, make
inventive experiments in their peculiar line, but it's only one in a
thousand who is a genius at that sort of thing, and produces anything
remarkable or valuable enough to bring them a fortune. Benham is a
clever, industrious fellow, but he isn't a genius; so we won't make a
hero for a story out of him, my dear." And Mr. Dering nodded with a
smile at Mary,--a smile that brought a blush to Mary's cheek, for she
knew that papa was making fun of what he called her sentimentality.