Everybodys Lonesome | Page 2

while she took some fancy work and went to see a girl friend, or a girl friend brought some fancy work and came to see her. Occasionally she and another girl went for a walk. Semi-occasionally there was a church social or a sewing circle luncheon, or somebody gave a party.
Somebody had given a party to-day, and Mary Alice had gone to it with high hope of finding it "interesting" and had come away from it with a deep despair of ever finding in life that which would make the monotony of it worth while.
Many another girl, feeling as Mary Alice did, would have gone away from home seeking "life" in a big city. But Mary Alice, besides having no qualifications for earning her way in a big city, had a most unhappy shyness. She was literally afraid of strangers, and never got very well acquainted even with persons she had associated with for a long time.
At the party to-day--it was an afternoon tea--Mary Alice had been more bitterly conscious than ever before of her lack of charms and the bleak prospect that lack entailed upon her. For the tea was given for a girl who was visiting in town, a girl of a sort Mary Alice had never seen before. She was pretty, that visiting girl, and she was sweet; she had a charm that was irresistible; she seemed to like everybody, and there was no mistake about everybody liking her. Even the town girls liked her and were not jealous. Even Mary Alice liked her, and was not afraid of her. But there she was--that girl!--vital, radiant, an example of what life might be, at twenty. And Mary Alice came away hating as she had never done before, life as it was for her and as it promised to continue.
Presently she withdrew her head from the pillow and lay looking into the dark where, as we all know, the things that might be, that should have been, shape themselves so much more readily than in any light. And, lying there, Mary Alice wondered if there were any fairy power on earth that could make of her a being half so sweet as that girl she had seen this afternoon.
Then she heard her mother open the sitting-room door and call her. It was time to get their simple supper ready.
"In a minute!" she called back. "I'm changing my dress." And she jerked at the hooks of her blue taffeta "jumper dress" with uncareful haste; bathed her face in cold water; put on her dark red serge which had been "good" last year; and went down-stairs to help her mother.
She could see it all as she went--all she was to do. There was the threadbare blanket they used for a silence cloth, and the table-cloth with the red stain by Johnny's place where he had spilled cranberry jelly the night before last, when the cloth was "span clean." There were the places to set, as always, with the same old dishes and the same old knives and forks; and with the mechanical precision born of long practice she would rightly place, without half looking at them, the various napkins each in its slightly different wooden ring. The utmost variety that she could hope for would be hot gingerbread instead of the last of Sunday's layer-cake, and maybe frizzled beef, since they had finished Sunday's roast in a meat pie this noon.
"I didn't hear you come in," said her mother as Mary Alice opened the sitting-room door, "and I was listening for you."
"I went right up-stairs to change my things," said Mary Alice, hoping that would end the matter.
"That's what I knew you must have done when it got to be six o'clock and I didn't hear you. I could hardly wait for you to come. I've such a surprise for you."
Mary Alice could hardly believe her ears. "A surprise?" she echoed, incredulously.
"Yes. I got a letter this afternoon from your dear godmother."
"Oh!" Mary Alice's tone said plainly: Is that all? She had her own opinion of her godmother, whom she had not seen since she was a small child, and it was not an enthusiastic one. Her name--which she hated--was her godmother's name. And aside from that, all she had ever got from her godmother was an occasional letter and, on Christmas and birthdays, a handkerchief or turnover collar or some other such trifle as could come in an envelope from Europe where her godmother lived.
Even in the matter of a godmother, it seemed, it was Mary Alice's luck to have one without any of the fairy powers. For although Mary Alice's mother had dearly loved, in her girlhood, that friend for whom she had called her first baby, she had always to admit, to Mary Alice's eager questioning, that