Girl Alone. Anne Austin
Miss Pond send her up to you. You have an empty bed in this dormitory, I believe.”
“Yes, Mrs. Stone,” Sally nodded. “Christine’s bed.” There was nothing in her voice to indicate that she had loved Christine more than any child she had ever had charge of.
“I suppose this new child will be snapped up soon,” Mrs. Stone continued, her severe voice striving to be pleasant and conversational, for she was fond of Sally, in her own way. “She has yellow curls, though I suspect her mother, who has just died and who was a stock company actress, used peroxide on it. But still it’s yellow and it’s curly, and we have at least a hundred applications on file for little girls with golden curly hair.
“Thelma,” she whirled severely upon the eight-year-old child, “what’s this in your bed?” Her broad, heavy palm, sweeping expertly down the sheet-covered iron cot, had encountered something, a piece of broken blue bottle.
“It—it’s mine,” Thelma quivered, her tongue licking upward to catch the first salty tear. “I traded my broken doll for it. I look through it and it makes everything look pretty and blue,” she explained desperately, in the institutional whine. “Oh, please let me keep it, Mrs. Stone!”
But the matron had tossed the bit of blue glass through the nearest window. “You’d cut yourself on it, Thelma,” she justified herself in her stern voice. “I’ll see if I can find another doll for you in the next box of presents that comes in. Now, don’t cry like a baby. You’re a great big girl. It was just a piece of broken old bottle. Well, Sally, you take charge of the new little girl. Make her feel at home. Give her a bath with that insect soap, and make a bundle of her clothes and take them down to Miss Pond.”
She lifted her long, starched skirt as she stepped over one of the scrubber’s puddles of water, then moved majestically through the door.
Clara, the nine-year-old orphan, stuck out her tongue as the white skirt swished through the door, then turned upon Sally, her little face sharp and ugly with hatred.
“Mean old thing! Always buttin’ in! Can’t let us have no fun at all! Some other kid’ll find Thelma’s sapphire and keep it offen her—”
“It isn’t a sapphire,” Sally said dully, her brush beginning to describe new semi-circles on the pine floor. “It’s like she said—just a piece of broken old bottle. And she said she’d try to find you a doll, Thelma.”
“You said it was a sapphire, Sally. You said it was worth millions and millions of dollars. It was a sapphire, long as you said it was, Sally!” Thelma sobbed, as grieved for the loss of illusion as for the loss of her treasure.
“I reckon I’m plumb foolish to go on play-acting all the time,” Sally Ford said dully.
The three little girls and the 16-year-old “mother” of them scrubbed in silence for several minutes, doggedly hurrying to make up for lost time. Then Thelma, who could never nurse grief or anger, spoke cheerfully:
“Reckon the new kid’s gettin’ her phys’cal zamination. When I come into the ’sylum you had to nearly boil me alive. ’N Mrs. Stone cut off all my hair clean to the skin. ’N ’en nobody wouldn’t ’dopt me ’cause I looked like sich a scarecrow. But I got lotsa hair now, ain’t I, Sal-lee?”
“Oh, somebody’ll be adopting you first thing you know, and then I won’t have any Thelma,” Sally smiled at her.
“Say, Sal-lee” Clara wheedled, “why didn’t nobody ever ’dopt you? I think you’re awful pretty. Sometimes it makes me feel all funny and cry-ey inside, you look so awful pretty. When you’re play-actin’,” she amended honestly. Sally Ford moved the big brush with angry vigor, while her pale face colored a dull red. “I ain’t—I mean, I’m not pretty at all, Clara. But thank you just the same. I used to want to be adopted, but now I don’t. I want to hurry up and get to be eighteen so’s I can leave the asylum and make my own living. I want—” but she stopped herself in time. Not to these open-mouthed, wide-eared children could she tell her dream of dreams.
“But why wasn’t you adopted, Sal-lee?” Betsy, the baby of the group, insisted. “You been here forever and ever, ain’t you?”
“Since I was four years old,” Sally admitted from between lips held tight to keep them from trembling. “When I was little as you, Betsy, one of the big girls told me I was sickly and awf’ly tiny and scrawny when I was brought in, so nobody wanted to adopt me. They don’t like sickly babies,” she added bitterly. “They just want fat little babies with curly hair. Seems to me like the Lord oughta made all orphans pretty, with golden curly hair.”
“I know why Sally wasn’t ’dopted,” Thelma clamored for attention. “I heard Miss Pond say it was a sin and a shame the way old Stone-Face has kept Sally here, year in and year out, jist ’cause she’s so good to us little kids. Miss Pond said Sally is better’n any trained nurse when us kids get sick and that she does more work than any ‘big girl’ they ever had here. That’s why you ain’t been ’dopted, Sally.”
“I know it,” Sally confessed in a low voice. “But I couldn’t be mean to the babies, just so they’d want to get rid of me and let somebody adopt me. Besides,” she added, “I’m scared of people—outside. I’m scared of all grown-up people, especially of adopters,” she blurted miserably. “I can’t sashay up and down before ’em and act cute and laugh and pretend like I’ve got a sweet disposition and like I’m crazy about ’em. I don’t look pretty a bit when the adopters send for me. I can’t play-act then.”
“You’re bashful, Sal-lee,” Clara told her shrewdly. “I’m not bashful—much, except when visitors come and we have to show off our company manners. I hate visitors! They whisper about us, call us ‘poor little things,’ and think they’re better’n us.”
The floor of the big room had been completely scrubbed, and was giving out a moist odor of yellow soap when Miss Pond, who worked in the office on the first floor of the big main building, arrived leading a reluctant little girl by the hand.
To the four orphans in faded blue and white gingham the newcomer looked unbelievably splendid, more like the “princess” that Betsy had been impersonating than like a mortal child. Her golden hair hung in precisely arranged curls to her shoulders. Her dress was of pink crepe de chine, trimmed with many yards of cream-colored lace. There were pink silk socks and little white kid slippers. And her pretty face, though it was streaked with tears, had been artfully coated with white powder and tinted, on cheeks and lips, with carmine rouge.
“This is Eloise Durant, girls,” said Miss Pond, who was incurably sentimental and kind to orphans. “She’s feeling a little homesick now and I know you will all try to make her happy. You’ll take charge of her, won’t you, Sally dear?”
“Yes, Miss Pond,” Sally answered automatically, but her arms were already yearning to gather the little bundle of elegance and tears and homesickness.
“And Sally,” Miss Pond said nervously, lowering her voice in the false hope that the weeping child might not hear her, “Mrs. Stone says her hair must be washed and then braided, like the other children’s. Eloise tells us it isn’t naturally curly, that her mother did it up on kid curlers every night. Her aunt’s been doing it for her since her mother—died.”
“I don’t want to be an orphan,” the newcomer protested passionately, a white-slippered foot flying out suddenly and kicking Miss Pond on the shin.
It was then that Sally took charge. She knelt, regardless of frantic, kicking little feet, and put her arms about Eloise Durant. She began to whisper to the terror-stricken child, and Miss Pond scurried away, her kind eyes brimming with tears, her kind heart swelling with impractical plans for finding luxurious homes and incredibly kind foster parents for all the orphans in the asylum—but especially for those with golden curly hair and blue eyes. For Miss Pond was a born “adopter,” with all the typical adopter’s prejudices and preferences.
When