The Camp Fire Girls' Careers. Vandercook Margaret
changed her mind in regard to her promise to her sister. For instead of going into the kitchen a very little while later she came downstairs dressed for the street. Opening the front door, she went out into the winter sunshine and started walking as rapidly as possible in the direction of one of the poorer quarters of the city.
CHAPTER VI – The Fire-Maker’s Desire
Outside the window of a small florist’s shop Betty paused for an instant. Then she stepped in and a little later came out carrying half a dozen red roses and a bunch of holly and fragrant cedar. Curiously enough, her expression in this short time had changed. Perhaps the flowers gave the added color to her face. She was repeating something over to herself and half smiling; but, as there were no people on the street except a few dirty children who were playing cheerfully in the gutter, no one observed her eccentric behavior.
“As fuel is brought to the fire
So I purpose to bring
My strength,
My ambition,
My heart’s desire,
My joy
And my sorrow
To the fire
Of humankind.
For I will tend,
As my fathers have tended,
And my father’s fathers,
Since time began,
The fire that is called
The love of man for man,
The love of man for God.”
Betty’s delicate, eyebrows were drawn so close together that they appeared almost heart shaped. “I fear I have only been tending the love of a girl for herself these past few months, so perhaps it is just as well that I should try to reform,” she thought half whimsically and yet with reproach. “Anyhow, I shall telephone Meg Everett this very afternoon, though I am glad Esther does not know the reason Meg and I have been seeing so little of each other lately, and that the fault is mine, not hers.”
By this time the girl had arrived in front of a large, dull, brown-stone building in the middle of a dingy street, with a subdued hush about it. Above the broad entrance hung a sign, “Home For Crippled Children.” Here for a moment Betty Ashton’s courage seemed to waver, for she paused irresolutely, but a little later she entered the hall. A week before she had promised an acquaintance at the church where Esther was singing to come to the children’s hospital some day and amuse them by telling stories. Since she had not thought seriously of her promise, although intending to fulfill it when she had discovered stories worth the telling. This morning while worrying over her own affair it had occurred to her that the best thing she could do was to do something for some one else. Hence the visit to the hospital.
Yet here at the moment of her arrival Betty had not the faintest idea of what she could do or say to make herself acceptable as a visitor. She had a peculiar antipathy to being regarded as a conventional philanthropist, one of the individuals with the instinct to patronize persons less fortunate.
Long ago when through her wealth and sympathy Betty had been able to do helpful things for her acquaintances, always she had felt the same shrinking sense of embarrassment, disliking to be thanked for kindnesses. Yet actually in his last letter Anthony Graham had dared remind her of their first meeting, an occasion she wished forgotten between them both.
The matron of the children’s hospital had been sent for and a little later she was conducting Betty down a broad, bare hall and then ushering her into a big sunlit room, not half so cheerless as its visitor had anticipated.
There were two large French windows on the southern side and a table piled with books and magazines. Near one of these windows two girls were seated in rolling chairs reading. They must have been about fourteen years old and did not look particularly frail. Across from them were four other girls, perhaps a year or so younger, engaged in a game of parchesi. On the floor in the corner a pretty little girl was sewing on her doll clothes and another was hopping merrily about on her crutches, interfering with every one else. Only two of the cot beds in the room were occupied, and to these Betty’s eyes turned instinctively. In one she saw a happy little German maiden with yellow hair and pale pink cheeks propped up on pillows, busily assorting half a dozen colors of crochet cotton. In the other a figure was lying flat with the eyes staring at the ceiling. And at the first glance there was merely an effect of some one indescribably thin with a quantity of short, curly dark hair spread out on the white pillow.
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