Part 1 (1/2)
Nancy of Paradise Cottage.
by s.h.i.+rley Watkins.
CHAPTER I
THE HEROINE GOES TO MARKET
”Let's see--bacon, eggs, bread, sugar, two cans of corn, and jam. Have I gotten everything, Alma?” Nancy, checking off the items in her marketing list, looked over toward her sister, who had wandered to the door and stood gazing out into the street where a gentle September rain was falling. Alma did not answer, seeming to have gone into a dream, and the grocer waited patiently, his pencil poised over his pad.
”Alma, do wake up! Have I forgotten anything? I'm sure there was something else,” said Nancy, frowning, and studying her list, with her under lip thrust forward. ”I regularly go and forget something every Sat.u.r.day night, when there's no Hannah to concoct something out of nothing for Sunday luncheon.”
”You said you were going to bake a cake--a chocolate layer cake,”
suggested Alma, turning, and viewing the proceeding disinterestedly with her hands in her pockets.
”That's it. I have to get flour, and some cooking chocolate, and vanilla. Alma, you've got to help me carry these things. I'm not Goliath.”
”Mercy, Nancy, we don't have to take all that home with us, do we?
Can't you send them, Mr. Simpson?”
The grocer shrugged apologetically.
”It's Sat.u.r.day, Miss Prescott, and the last delivery went out at three--all my boys have gone home now or I'd try to accommodate you.”
”I do hate to go about looking like an old market woman, with my arms full of brown paper parcels,” murmured Alma, _sotto voce_ to her sister.
”Goodness, I don't imagine there'll be a grand stand along the way, with thousands watching us through opera gla.s.ses,” laughed Nancy.
”Would you mind telling me whom you expect to meet who'd faint with genteel horror because we take home our Sunday dinner? I don't intend to starve to spare anybody's feelings.”
”Last week I was dragging along a bag of potatoes--and--and I met Frank Barrows. And the bag split while I was talking to him, and those hateful potatoes went b.u.mping around all over the pavement. I never was so mortified in my life,” said Alma, sulkily.
Nancy shot a keen glance at her sister's pretty face, and her eyes twinkled. Alma's shortage of the American commodity called humor was a source of continual quiet joy to Nancy, who was the only member of the Prescott family with the full-sized endowment of that gift.
”Dear me, whatever did Frank do? Scream and cover his eyes from the awful sight? Had he never seen a raw potato in all his sheltered young life?”
Alma shrugged her shoulders--a slight gesture with which she and her mother were wont to express their hopeless realization of Nancy's lack of finer feelings.
”I don't suppose you would have minded it. But _I_ hate to look ridiculous, particularly before anyone like Frank Barrows.”
”But, Alma, you funny girl, don't you see that you look a thousand times more ridiculous when you act as if a few potatoes bouncing about were something serious? Don't tell me you stood there gazing off haughtily into the blue distance while Frank gathered up your silly old potatoes? Or did you disown them? Or did you play St. Elizabeth, and expect a miracle to turn them into roses so that they would be less offensive to Frank's aristocratic eyes? Come on now, help me shoulder our provisions. We're members of the Swiss Family Robinson, going back to our hut with our spoils. Pretend we're savages, and this is a desert island, and not respectable Melbrook at all. Next time we go marketing you can disguise yourself with a beard and blue goggles.”
Alma laughed unwillingly. She was a dainty and singularly pretty girl--a little bit foolish, and a good bit of a sn.o.b, but Nancy adored her, though she enjoyed making good-natured digs at Alma's weak spots.
They took up their bundles, said good-night to Mr. Simpson, and went out.
It was a walk of three miles from the village--or, as it preferred to be called--the town of Melbrook to the Prescotts' house, which lay in the country beyond, a modest little nest enough, where the two girls had grown up almost isolated by their poverty from the gay life of the younger Melbrookians. Alma chafed unhappily against this isolation, chafed against every reminder of their poverty, and, like her mother, once a beauty and a belle, craved the excitement of admiration, luxury and fine things. She was ashamed of the little house, which was shabby, it is true, ashamed of having to wear old clothes, and made herself wretched by envying the richer girls of the neighborhood their beautiful houses, their horses and their endless round of gay times.
As Nancy once told her mother, in affectionate reproof, they were always trying to ”play rich”--Mrs. Prescott and Alma. She had tried to teach Alma her own secret of finding life pleasant; but Alma did not love books, nor long solitary walks through the summer woods; and Nancy's ambition of fitting herself to meet the world and make her own living seemed to both Alma and her mother dreary and unfeminine.
Somewhere, in the back of her pretty head, Mrs. Prescott cherished the hope and the belief that the two girls would find some way of coming into what she called ”their own”--not by Nancy's independent plan of action, but through some easier, pleasanter course. She shuddered at the idea of their making their own living, and opposed Nancy's wish to go to college on the ground that no men liked blue-stocking women, and that therefore Nancy would be an old maid.
”But, Mother darling, we can't just sit back and wait for some young millionaire to come and carry us off?” Nancy would plead, shaking her head. Time was flying, and Nancy was seventeen, and eager to begin her own life. ”Let me go--I can work my way through, and Alma can stay at home with you.”