Janice Meredith | Page 3

shalloon?"
"'T is vastly unbecoming."
"Janice Meredith! Can't thee let the men alone?"
"I will when they will," airily laughed the girl.
"Do unto others--" quoted Tabitha.
"Then I will when thee sets me an example," retorted Janice, making a deep curtsey, the absence of drapery and bodice revealing the straightness and suppleness of the slender rounded figure, which still had as much of the child as of the woman in its lines.
"Little thought they get from me," cried Tabitha, with a toss of her head.
"'Tell me where is fancy bred, In the heart or in the head?'"
hummed Janice. "Of course, one does n't think about men, Mistress Tabitha. One feels." Which remark showed perception of a feminine truth far in advance of Miss Meredith's years.
"Unfeeling Janice!"
"'T is a good thing for the oafs and ploughboys of Brunswick. For there are none better."
"Philemon Hennion?"
"'Your servant, marms,'" mimicked Janice, catching up a hair brush and taking it from her head as if it were a hat, while making a bow with her feet widely spread. "'Having nothing better ter do, I've made bold ter come over ter drink a dish of tea with you.'" The girl put the brush under her arm, still further spread her feet, put her hands behind some pretended coat-tails, let the brush slip from under her arms, so that it fell to the floor with a racket, stooped with an affectation of clumsiness which seemed impossible to the lithe figure, while mumbling something inarticulate in an apparent paroxysm of embarrassment,--which quickly became a genuine inability to speak from laughter.
"Janice, thee should turn actress."
"Oh, Tibbie, lace my bodice quickly, or I shall burst of laughing," breathlessly begged the girl.
"Janice," said her mother, entering, "how often must I tell thee that giggling is missish? Stop, this moment."
"Yes, mommy," gasped Janice. Then she added, after a shriek and a wriggle, "Don't, Tabitha!"
"What ails thee now, child? Art going to have an attack of the megrims?"
"When Tibbie laces me up she always tickles me, because she knows I'm dreadfully ticklish."
"I can't ever make the edges of the bodice meet, so I tickle to make her squirm," explained Miss Drinker.
"Go on with thy own dressing, Tabitha," ordered Mrs. Meredith, taking the strings from her hand. "Now breathe out, Janice."
Miss Meredith drew a long breath, and then expelled it, instant advantage being taken by her mother to strain the strings. "Again," she said, holding all that had been gained, and the operation was repeated, this time the edges of the frock meeting across the back.
"It hurts," complained the owner of the waist, panting, while the upper part of her bust rose and fell rapidly in an attempt to make up for the crushing of the lower lungs.
"I lose all patience with thee, Janice," cried her mother. "Here when thou hast been given by Providence a waist that would be the envy of any York woman, that thou shouldst object to clothes made to set it off to a proper advantage."
"It hurts all the same," reiterated Janice; "and last year I could beat Jacky Whitehead, but now when I try to run in my new frocks I come nigh to dying of breathlessness."
"I should hope so!" exclaimed her mother. "A female of fifteen run with a boy, indeed! The very idea is indelicate. Now, as soon as thou hast put on thy slippers and goloe-shoes, go to thy father, who has been told of thy misbehaviour, and who will reprove thee for it." And with this last damper on the "lightness of young people," as Mrs. Meredith phrased it, she once more left the room. It is a regrettable fact that Miss Janice, who had looked the picture of submission as her mother spoke, made a mouth, which was far from respectful, at the departing figure.
"Oh, Janice," said Tabitha, "will he be very severe?"
"Severe?" laughed Janice. "If dear dadda is really angry, I'll let tears come into my eyes, and then he'll say he's sorry he hurt my feelings, and kiss me; but if he's only doing it to please mommy, I'll let my eyes shine, and then he'll laugh and tell me to kiss him. Oh, Tibbie, what a nice time we could have if women were only as easy to manage as men!" With this parting regret, Miss Meredith sallied forth to receive the expected reproof.
The lecture or kiss received,--and a sight of Miss Meredith would have led the casual observer to opine that the latter was the form of punishment adopted,--the two girls mounted into the big, lumbering coach along with their elders, and were jolted and shaken over the four miles of ill-made road that separated Greenwood, the "seat," as the "New York Gazette" termed it, of the Honourable Lambert Meredith, from the village of Brunswick, New Jersey. Either this shaking, or something else,