Sisters. North Grace May
was peering in where, close to the ice, lay the cheesecloth bag of crisped lettuce and a bowl of tiny cooked beets. These she carried to the long white table as she asked: “May I prepare it just as I want to, Miss O’Hara, or have you some special way of doing it?”
“Fix it to suit yourself,” was the ungrudgingly given response. “You’ll find all sort of bowls for it in the pantry, you’ll need four, there being four tables.”
Jenny chose pretty glass bowls and set about making as artistic a salad as she could, and, while she worked, she told the whole story to a listener who at first was merely curious, but who gradually became interested and finally sympathetic. “Well, I sure certain wish I’d known about her comin’ to this country and findin’ her mother dead. Like as not I’d have tried some to cheer her up. As I look back on it now, I wasn’t any too patient with her. It’ll be a lesson to me, that’s what it will. When the next orphan comes to this kitchen, I’ll try to make it as home-like for her as I can.” Then the cook recalled her own troubles. “How-some-ever, I wish Etta Heldt had given me notice. Here I’ll be without a helper for no one knows how long, a week maybe.”
Jenny, having heaped a glass bowl with a most appetizing salad, stepped back to admire it. Then she revealed her plan. “Miss O’Hara, if you’ll let me, I’ll come right over after school every day and do Etta’s work until you can get another helper.”
Miss O’Hara again turned, another knife in her hand, as she had been cutting bread. “Jenny Warner, are you meaning that? Will you help out for a few days? Well, the Saints bless the purty face of you as they’ve done already. I only wish I could have a helper all the time as cheery as you are. I could get on with after-school help. I’m thinkin’, on a scratch.”
Then, glancing at the clock, she continued: “Well, if ’tisn’t eleven-thirty all ready. Here, cut the bread, will you, Jenny, while I go upstairs and see if one of the maids won’t help with the servin’ today? I can’t be in the kitchen dishin’ up, an’ in the dinin’ room at the same time.”
Jenny, glad to assist in any way, finished the task, and then wandered to a window near to await further orders. She heard a gong ringing somewhere in the big school. Then a side door opened and a bevy of girls, about her own age, trooped out on the lawn for a half hour of recreation before lunch. How pretty they were, nearly all of them, the watcher thought. By their care-free, laughing faces she concluded that they had none of them known a sorrow or felt a feather weight of responsibility. They had come from homes of wealth, Jenny knew, where they had had every pleasure and luxury their hearts could desire. But she did not envy them. Where in all the wide world was there a home more picturesque than her very own old adobe farmhouse, overgrown with blossoming vines, with the ever-changing ocean and the rocky point in front, and at the back the orchard, which, all the year round, was such a delight. And who could they have in their rich homes more lovable than Granny Sue and Grandpa Si? There couldn’t be any one more lovable in all the land. Then the watcher wondered which one of the girls was Harold P-J’s sister. “Proud and domineering,” Miss O’Hara had said that she was. Maybe she was that tall girl who had drawn apart from the rest with two companions. She carried herself haughtily and there was a smile on her face that Jenny did not like. It was as though she were accompanying it with sarcastic comment about the other girls. The two who were with her glanced in the direction which their leader had indicated. Jenny did also and saw a shy-looking girl dressed far simpler than the others, whose light brown hair hung straight down, fastened at her neck by a plain brown ribbon. “She must be a new pupil, too,” Jenny decided, “for she doesn’t seem to be acquainted with any of the girls.”
At that moment Miss O’Hara returned, more flustered than she had been an hour earlier, if that were possible. “The de’il himself is tryin’ to fret me, I’m thinkin’,” she announced. “That silly Peg Hanson’s had a letter and there’s somethin’ in it that upset her so, she took a fit of cryin’ and now she’s got one of her blind headaches and can’t stand. The other maid’s in the middle of the upstairs cleanin’, being as she had to do Peg’s work and her own. Now, I’d like to know who is to wait on that parcel of gigglin’ girls this noon? That’s what!”
“O, Miss O’Hara, won’t you let me? I’m just wild to have a chance to be near enough to them to hear what they say. It would be awfully interesting to me. Please say that I may?”
The cook stared her amazement. “Well, now, what do you know about waitin’?” she inquired.
“Nothing at all,” was the merry reply, “but my teacher has often said that I have a good intelligence, and I do believe, if you’d tell me what ought to be done, I could remember enough to get through.”
The cook’s troubled face broke into a pleased smile. “Jenny Warner,” she commented, “you’re as good as a pinch of soda in sour milk. Somehow mountain-sized troubles dwindle down to less’n nothin’ when you take a hand in them.” She glanced at the clock.
“Lunch is served at twelve-thirty,” she continued. “We’ll have to both pitch in and get things on the table, and, while we’re doin’ it, I’ll tell you what you’ll have to know about servin’.”
Jenny was in a flutter of excitement half an hour later as she donned the white cap and apron of the waitress uniform. They were really very becoming, and soft brown ringlets peeped out from under the dainty band-like cap which was tied about her head.
“There’s very little waitin’-on to be done at noon, thanks for that,” Miss O’Hara said. “Most things are on the table, but you’ll have to go around and pour the chocolate and do the things as I told you. There now! The bell’s ringing and I hear those silly girls laughing, so they’re all in the dining room. Here’s the chocolate pot. I haven’t filled it full, fearin’ it might be too heavy. You’ll have to come back and get more when that’s gone.”
With cheeks flushed and eyes shining, as though she were about to do something which pleased her extremely, Jenny entered the dining room, where four tables, surrounded by girls, stood along the walls. Few there were who even noticed her as she went from place to place filling the dainty cups with steaming liquid.
At the first table the girls were chattering about a theatre party to which they were going with Miss Granger, and not one of them gave the waitress more than a fleeting glance. But at the second table Jenny found the girl she sought. The sister of Harold P-J, and the daughter of the proud owner of Rocky Point Farm.
The little waitress knew at once which she was, for a companion spoke her name. Jenny was disappointed when she heard her speak. There was a fretful, discontented note in her voice. And why should there be, she wondered, as she slowly approached the end of the table where Gwynette Poindexter-Jones sat with an intimate friend from San Francisco at each side.
Surely she had everything her heart could desire. But evidently this was not true, for, as Jenny drew nearer, she could hear what was being said.
“Patricia Sullivan, you make me weary! You certainly do!” she addressed the girl on her right. “How can you say that this is a pleasant place? When I think of my mother in France luxuriating in the sort of life I most enjoy, it makes me rebellious. Sometimes I feel that I just can’t forgive her. What right has a mother to send her daughter to an out-of-the-way country boarding school if the girl prefers to be educated abroad?”
The friend who had been called “Patricia” now put in, almost apologetically: “But I merely said that it is a beautiful country, and I repeat that it is. I think that it is wonderful to be so high up on a foothill and have a sweeping view of the ocean from one side of the school and a view of the mountains from the other side.”
A shrug, accompanied by an utterance of bored impatience, then Gwynette’s reply: “Scenery isn’t what I want, and if I did, I prefer it in France.”
After glancing critically from one table to another, she continued:
“There isn’t a single girl in this room who belongs to our class, really. They are all our social inferiors.”
But Beulah Hollingsworth, the friend on Gwynette’s left,