Daddy-Long-Legs | Page 3

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DADDY-LONG-LEGS
JEAN WEBSTER
Copyright 1912 by The Century Company

TO YOU
Blue Wednesday
The first Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly Awful Day--a day
to be awaited with dread, endured with courage and forgotten with
haste. Every floor must be spotless, every chair dustless, and every bed
without a wrinkle. Ninety-seven squirming little orphans must be
scrubbed and combed and buttoned into freshly starched ginghams; and

all ninety-seven reminded of their manners, and told to say, `Yes, sir,'
`No, sir,' whenever a Trustee spoke.
It was a distressing time; and poor Jerusha Abbott, being the oldest
orphan, had to bear the brunt of it. But this particular first Wednesday,
like its predecessors, finally dragged itself to a close. Jerusha escaped
from the pantry where she had been making sandwiches for the
asylum's guests, and turned upstairs to accomplish her regular work.
Her special care was room F, where eleven little tots, from four to
seven, occupied eleven little cots set in a row. Jerusha assembled her
charges, straightened their rumpled frocks, wiped their noses, and
started them in an orderly and willing line towards the dining-room to
engage themselves for a blessed half hour with bread and milk and
prune pudding.
Then she dropped down on the window seat and leaned throbbing
temples against the cool glass. She had been on her feet since five that
morning, doing everybody's bidding, scolded and hurried by a nervous
matron. Mrs. Lippett, behind the scenes, did not always maintain that
calm and pompous dignity with which she faced an audience of
Trustees and lady visitors. Jerusha gazed out across a broad stretch of
frozen lawn, beyond the tall iron paling that marked the confines of the
asylum, down undulating ridges sprinkled with country estates, to the
spires of the village rising from the midst of bare trees.
The day was ended--quite successfully, so far as she knew. The
Trustees and the visiting committee had made their rounds, and read
their reports, and drunk their tea, and now were hurrying home to their
own cheerful firesides, to forget their bothersome little charges for
another month. Jerusha leaned forward watching with curiosity--and a
touch of wistfulness--the stream of carriages and automobiles that
rolled out of the asylum gates. In imagination she followed first one
equipage, then another, to the big houses dotted along the hillside. She
pictured herself in a fur coat and a velvet hat trimmed with feathers
leaning back in the seat and nonchalantly murmuring `Home' to the
driver. But on the door-sill of her home the picture grew blurred.
Jerusha had an imagination--an imagination, Mrs. Lippett told her, that

would get her into trouble if she didn't take care--but keen as it was, it
could not carry her beyond the front porch of the houses she would
enter. Poor, eager, adventurous little Jerusha, in all her seventeen years,
had never stepped inside an ordinary house; she could not picture the
daily routine of those other human beings who carried on their lives
undiscommoded by orphans.
Je-ru-sha Ab-bott You are wan-ted In the of-fice, And I think you'd
Better hurry up!
Tommy Dillon, who had joined the choir, came singing up the stairs
and down the corridor, his chant growing louder as he approached
room F. Jerusha wrenched herself from the window and refaced the
troubles of life.
`Who wants me?' she cut into Tommy's chant with a note of sharp
anxiety.
Mrs. Lippett in the office, And I think she's mad. Ah-a-men!
Tommy piously intoned, but his accent was not entirely malicious.
Even the most hardened little orphan felt sympathy for an erring sister
who was summoned to the office to face an annoyed matron; and
Tommy liked Jerusha even if she did sometimes jerk him by the arm
and nearly scrub his nose off.
Jerusha went without comment, but with two parallel lines on her brow.