Mary Rose of Mifflin | Page 9

cents. The forty-three cents I saved and the dollar Mr. Black gave me when he took me to the train in Mifflin. How much should a cat's board be?" anxiously.
"How much milk does he drink? Milk's seven cents a quart in Waloo."
"Oh, not more than a quart a day," eagerly. "And he's almost too fat now."
"A quart a day would be seven times seven----"
"I know. I know all my tables up to twelve times twelve. That would be forty-nine cents. Do you think fifty cents would be enough?"
"I should think fifty cents a week very good board for a cat. Suppose we go in and see what my Aunt Mary has to say."
His Aunt Mary proved to be a plump lady with a round rosy face, who agreed with Mary Rose that children and cats and dogs were most desirable additions to a family. She seemed quite glad to take George Washington as a boarder and thought that fifty cents a week was enough to charge as long as Mary Rose solemnly promised to come over every day and help take care of him. Mary Rose promised most solemnly.
"I'm so glad." She beamed on Mr. Jerry and his Aunt Mary and hugged George Washington. "It's a great relief to find a pleasant boarding place. I can pay for two weeks, almost three weeks now," she offered.
Mr. Jerry started to speak but his Aunt Mary shook her head and he shut his mouth with the words inside.
"We don't take board in advance for a cat," said his Aunt Mary in a way that told Mary Rose such a thing was never done. "In fact, we've never taken a cat to board before. I think it will be more satisfactory if we wait until the end of the week, when we can tell just how much milk he will drink," she added soberly.
"He's awfully greedy." Mary Rose looked sadly at the greedy George Washington. "But he's always had all he wanted. I can't tell you how much obliged I am and I'll come over every day. It's awfully good of you to take him when you haven't any other boarders."
"I'd take you, too, if I could," Mr. Jerry's Aunt Mary murmured as she went to get a ginger cooky.
"I'm going to find the beautiful princess," Mary Rose told Mr. Jerry, when she said good-by to him a few minutes later. "And when I do shall I tell her that the prince is not going to Jericho?"
"Do," he said and his face went all red again. "Tell her that he's going to stay right here on the job, that he will never give her up."
"Never give her up," repeated Mary Rose. She tried to say it as firmly as he had said it and she waved her hand as she went across the alley and into the back door of the Washington, with a most delicious thrill at entering such a two-faced building.
Mr. Jerry looked after her and frowned. Then he shook his fist at the Washington.
"You are an enchanted palace," he told it sternly. "If it weren't for doggone places like you, girls would have to stay at home. They couldn't go out in the world and grow so independent that they think work is the biggest thing in creation. Oh, Godfrey! it isn't normal for any girl to like a job better than a perfectly good man. When I think of Elizabeth Thorley wasting herself on advertisements for Bingham and Henderson's sickening jams when she might be making a Heaven for me it sends my temperature up until I'm afraid of spontaneous combustion. She wouldn't care if I did blow up and turn to ashes. She wouldn't care what happened to me so long as she could send out a new poster for peach marmalade. She wants to live her own life and not be tied down to a man or a home," he groaned. "Darn these feministic ideas, anyway! I wish I had been my own grandfather. The girl he wanted wasn't on any old factory payroll."
He had been in love with Elizabeth Thorley ever since one night, almost a year ago, when he had looked across a room and seen her red-brown hair, her oval face with its uplifted pointed chin, and met her laughing eyes. He had held her gaze for the fraction of a moment and in that time his heart had stopped beating. When it began again the world was a very different place to him. But, alas, it was not a different place to her. She had suffered no magical change by the short interchange of glances.
They had been the best of friends. They had a certain similarity of tastes and interests, for he was an architect and she was an advertising artist. But when