Read CHAPTER VI of Real Folks, free online book, by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, on ReadCentral.com.

AND

There is a piece of Z  , just over the river, that they call “And.”

It began among the school-girls; Barbara Holabird had christened it, with the shrewdness and mischief of fourteen years old. She said the “and-so-forths” lived there.

It was a little supplementary neighborhood; an after-growth, coming up with the railroad improvements, when they got a freight station established on that side for the East Z   mills. “After Z  , what should it be but ‘And?’” Barbara Holabird wanted to know. The people who lived there called it East Square; but what difference did that make?

It was two miles Boston-ward from Z   centre, where the down trains stopped first; that was five minutes gained in the time between it and the city. Land was cheap at first, and sure to come up in value; so there were some streets laid out at right angles, and a lot of houses put up after a pattern, as if they had all been turned out of blanc-mange moulds, and there was “East Square.” Then people began by-and-by to build for themselves, and a little variety and a good deal of ambition came in. They had got to French roofs now; this was just before the day of the multitudinous little paper collar-boxes with beveled covers, that are set down everywhere now, and look as if they could be lifted up by the chimneys, any time, and be carried off with a thumb and finger. Two and a half story houses, Mansarded, looked grand; and the East Square people thought nothing slight of themselves, though the “old places” and the real Z   families were all over on West Hill.

Mrs. Megilp boarded in And for the summer.

“Since Oswald had been in business she couldn’t go far from the cars, you know; and Oswald had a boat on the river, and he and Glossy enjoyed that so much. Besides, she had friends in Z  , which made it pleasant; and she was tired, for her part, of crowds and fashion. All she wanted was a quiet country place. She knew the Goldthwaites and the Haddens; she had met them one year at Jefferson.”

Mrs. Megilp had found out that she could get larger rooms in And than she could have at the mountains or the sea-shore, and at half the price; but this she did not mention. Yet there was nothing shabby in it, except her carefully not mentioning it.

Mrs. Megilp was Mrs. Grant Ledwith’s chief intimate and counselor. She was a good deal the elder; that was why it was mutually advantageous. Grant Ledwith was one of the out-in-the-world, up-to-the-times men of the day; the day in which everything is going, and everybody that is in active life has, somehow or other, all that is going. Grant Ledwith got a good salary, an inflated currency salary; and he spent it all. His daughters were growing up, and they were stylish and pretty; Mrs. Megilp took a great interest in Agatha and Florence Ledwith, and was always urging their mother to “do them justice.” “Agatha and Florence were girls who had a right to every advantage.” Mrs. Megilp was almost old enough to be Laura Ledwith’s mother; she had great experience, and knowledge of the world; and she sat behind Laura’s conscience and drove it tandem with her inclination.

Per contra, it was nice for Mrs. Megilp, who was a widow, and whose income did not stretch with the elasticity of the times, to have friends who lived like the Ledwiths, and who always made her welcome; it was a good thing for Glossy to be so fond of Agatha and Florence, and to have them so fond of her. “She needed young society,” her mother said. One reason that Glossy Megilp needed young society might be in the fact that she herself was twenty-six.

Mrs. Megilp had advised the Ledwiths to buy a house in Z-. “It was just far enough not to be suburban, but to have a society of its own; and there was excellent society in Z  , everybody knew. Boston was hard work, nowadays; the distances were getting to be so great.” Up to the West and South Ends, the material distances, she meant to be understood to say; but there was an inner sense to Mrs. Megilp’s utterances, also.

“One might as well be quite out of town; and then it was always something, even in such city connection as one might care to keep up, to hail from a well-recognized social independency; to belong to Z   was a standing, always. It wasn’t like going to Forest Dell, or Lakegrove, or Bellair; cheap little got-up places with fancy names, that were strung out on the railroads like French gilt beads on a chain.”

But for all that, Mrs. Ledwith had only got into “And;” and Mrs. Megilp knew it.

Laura did not realize it much; she had bowing and speaking acquaintance with the Haddens and the Hendees, and even with the Marchbankses, over on West Hill; and the Goldthwaites and the Holabirds, down in the town, she knew very well. She did not care to come much nearer; she did not want to be bound by any very stringent and exclusive social limits; it was a bother to keep up to all the demands of such a small, old-established set. Mrs. Hendee would not notice, far less be impressed by the advent of her new-style Brussels carpet with a border, or her full, fresh, Nottingham lace curtains, or the new covering of her drawing-room set with cuir-colored terry. Mrs. Tom Friske and Mrs. Philgry, down here at East Square, would run in, and appreciate, and admire, and talk it all over, and go away perhaps breaking the tenth commandment amiably in their hearts.

Mrs. Ledwith’s nerves had extended since we saw her as a girl; they did not then go beyond the floating ends of her blue or rose-colored ribbons, or, at furthest, the tip of her jaunty laced sunshade; now they ramified, for life still grows in some direction, to her chairs, and her china, and her curtains, and her ruffled pillow-shams. Also, savingly, to her children’s “suits,” and party dresses, and pic-nic hats, and double button gloves. Savingly; for there is a leaven of grace in mother-care, even though it be expended upon these. Her friend, Mrs. Inchdeepe, in Helvellyn Park, with whom she dined when she went shopping in Boston, had nothing but her modern improvements and her furniture. “My house is my life,” she used to say, going round with a Canton crape duster, touching tenderly carvings and inlayings and gildings.

Mrs. Megilp was spending the day with Laura Ledwith; Glossy was gone to town, and thence down to the sea-shore, with some friends.

Mrs. Megilp spent a good many days with Laura. She had large, bright rooms at her boarding-house, but then she had very gristly veal pies and thin tapioca puddings for dinner; and Mrs. Megilp’s constitution required something more generous. She was apt to happen in at this season, when Laura had potted pigeons. A little bird told her; a dozen little birds, I mean, with their legs tied together in a bunch; for she could see the market wagon from her window, when it turned up Mr. Ledwith’s avenue.

Laura had always the claret pitcher on her dinner table, too; and claret and water, well-sugared, went deliciously with the savory stew.

They were up-stairs now, in Laura’s chamber; the bed and sofa were covered with silk and millinery; Laura was looking over the girls’ “fall things;” there was a smell of sweet marjoram and thyme and cloves, and general richness coming up from the kitchen; there was a bland sense of the goodness of Providence in Mrs. Megilp’s no, not heart, for her heart was not very hungry; but in her eyes and nostrils.

She was advising Mrs. Ledwith to take Desire and Helena’s two green silks and make them over into one for Helena.

“You can get two whole back breadths then, by piecing it up under the sash; and you can’t have all those gores again; they are quite done with. Everybody puts in whole breadths now. There’s just as much difference in the way of goring a skirt, as there is between gores and straight selvages.”

“They do hang well, though; they have such a nice slope.”

“Yes, but the stripes and the seams! Those tell the story six rods off; and then there must be sashes, or postillions, or something; they don’t make anything without them; there isn’t any finish to a round waist unless you have something behind.”

“They wore belts last year, and I bought those expensive gilt buckles. I’m sure they used to look sweetly. But there! a fashion doesn’t last nowadays while you’re putting a thing on and walking out of the house!”

“And don’t put in more than three plaits,” pursued Mrs. Megilp, intent on the fate of the green silks. “Everything is gathered; you see that is what requires the sashes; round waists and gathers have a queer look without.”

“If you once begin to alter, you’ve got to make all over,” said Mrs. Ledwith, a little fractiously, putting the scissors in with unwilling fingers. She knew there was a good four days’ work before her, and she was quick with her needle, too.

“Never mind; the making over doesn’t cost anything; you turn off work so easily; and then you’ve got a really stylish thing.”

“But with all the ripping and remodelling, I don’t get time to turn round, myself, and live! It is all fall work, and spring work, and summer work and winter work. One drive rushes pell-mell right over another. There isn’t time enough to make things and have them; the good of them, I mean.”

“The girls get it; we have to live in our children,” said Mrs. Megilp, self-renouncingly. “I can never rest until Glossy is provided with everything; and you know, Laura, I am obliged to contrive.”

Mrs. Megilp and her daughter Glaucia spent about a thousand dollars a year, between them, on their dress. In these days, this is a limited allowance for the Megilps. But Mrs. Megilp was a woman of strict pecuniary principle; the other fifteen hundred must pay all the rest; she submitted cheerfully to the Divine allotment, and punctually made the two ends meet. She will have this to show, when the Lord of these servants cometh and reckoneth with them, and that man who has been also in narrow circumstances, brings his nicely kept talent out of his napkin.

Desire Ledwith, a girl of sixteen, spoke suddenly from a corner where she sat with a book,

“I do wonder who ‘they’ are, mamma!”

“Who?” said Mrs. Ledwith, half rising from her chair, and letting some breadths of silk slide down upon the floor from her lap, as she glanced anxiously from the window down the avenue. She did not want any company this morning.

“Not that, mamma; I don’t mean anybody coming. The ‘theys’ that wear, and don’t wear, things; the theys you have to be just like, and keep ripping and piecing for.”

“You absurd child!” exclaimed Mrs. Ledwith, pettishly. “To make me spill a whole lapful of work for that! They? Why, everybody, of course.”

“Everybody complains of them, though. Jean Friske says her mother is all discouraged and worn out. There isn’t a thing they had last year that won’t have to be made over this, because they put in a breadth more behind, and they only gore side seams. And they don’t wear black capes or cloth sacks any more with all kinds of dresses; you must have suits, clear through. It seems to me ‘they’ is a nuisance. And if it’s everybody, we must be part, of it. Why doesn’t somebody stop?”

“Desire, I wish you’d put away your book, and help, instead of asking silly questions. You can’t make the world over, with ’why don’ts?’”

“I’ll rip,” said Desire, with a slight emphasis; putting her book down, and coming over for a skirt and a pair of scissors. “But you know I’m no good at putting together again. And about making the world over, I don’t know but that might be as easy as making over all its clothes, I’d as lief try, of the two.”

Desire was never cross or disagreeable; she was only “impracticable,” her mother said. “And besides that, she didn’t know what she really did want. She was born hungry and asking, with those sharp little eyes, and her mouth always open while she was a baby. ‘It was a sign,’ the nurse said, when she was three weeks old. And then the other sign, that she should have to be called ‘Desire!’”

Mrs. Megilp for Mrs. Megilp had been in office as long ago as that had suggested ways of getting over or around the difficulty, when Aunt Desire had stipulated to have the baby named for her, and had made certain persuasive conditions.

“There’s the pretty French turn you might give it, ’Desiree.’ Only one more ‘e,’ and an accent. That is so sweet, and graceful, and distinguished!”

“But Aunt Desire won’t have the name twisted. It is to be real, plain Desire, or not at all.”

Mrs. Megilp had shrugged her shoulders.

“Well, of course it can be that, to christen by, and marry by, and be buried by. But between whiles, people pick up names, you’ll see!”

Mrs. Megilp began to call her Daisy when she was two years old. Nobody could help what Mrs. Megilp took a fancy to call her by way of endearment, of course; and Daisy she was growing to be in the family, when one day, at seven years old, she heard Mrs. Megilp say to her mother,

“I don’t see but that you’ve all got your Desire, after all. The old lady is satisfied; and away up there in Hanover, what can it signify to her? The child is ‘Daisy,’ practically, now, as long as she lives.”

The sharp, eager little gray eyes, so close together in the high, delicate head, glanced up quickly at speaker and hearer.

“What old lady, mamma, away up in Hanover?”

“Your Aunt Desire, Daisy, whom you were named for. She lives in Hanover. You are to go and see her there, this summer.”

“Will she call me Daisy?”

The little difficulty suggested in this question had singularly never occurred to Mrs. Ledwith before. Miss Desire Ledwith never came down to Boston; there was no danger at home.

“No. She is old-fashioned, and doesn’t like pet names. She will call you Desire. That is your name, you know.”

“Would it signify if she thought you called me Daisy?” asked the child frowning half absently over her doll, whose arm she was struggling to force into rather a tight sleeve of her own manufacture.

“Well, perhaps she might not exactly understand. People always went by their names when she was a child, and now hardly anybody does. She was very particular about having you called for her, and you are, you know. I always write ‘Desire Ledwith’ in all your books, and well, I always shall write it so, and so will you. But you can be Daisy when we make much of you here at home, just as Florence is Flossie.”

“No, I can’t,” said the little girl, very decidedly, getting up and dropping her doll. “Aunt Desire, away up in Hanover, is thinking all the time that there is a little Desire Ledwith growing up down here. I don’t mean to have her cheated. I’m going to went by my name, as she did. Don’t call me Daisy any more, all of you; for I shan’t come!”

The gray eyes sparkled; the whole little face scintillated, as it were. Desire Ledwith had a keen, charged little face; and when something quick and strong shone through it, it was as if somewhere behind it there had been struck fire.

She was true to that through all the years after; going to school with Mabels and Ethels and Graces and Ediths, not a girl she knew but had a pretty modern name, and they all wondering at that stiff little “Desire” of hers that she would go by. When she was twelve years old, the old lady up in Hanover had died, and left her a gold watch, large and old-fashioned, which she could only keep on a stand in her room, a good solid silver tea-set, and all her spoons, and twenty-five shares in the Hanover Bank.

Mrs. Megilp called her Daisy, with gentle inadvertence, one day after that. Desire lifted her eyes slowly at her, with no other reply in her face, or else.

“You might please your mother now, I think,” said Mrs. Megilp. “There is no old lady to be troubled by it.”

“A promise isn’t ever dead, Mrs. Megilp,” said Desire, briefly. “I shall keep our words.”

“After all,” Mrs. Megilp said privately to the mother, “there is something quietly aristocratic in an old, plain, family name. I don’t know that it isn’t good taste in the child. Everybody understands that it was a condition, and an inheritance.”

Mrs. Megilp had taken care of that. She was watchful for the small impressions she could make in behalf of her particular friends. She carried about with her a little social circumference in which all was preeminently as it should be.

But, as I would say if you could not see it for yourself this is a digression. We will go back again.

“If it were any use!” said Desire, shaking out the deep plaits as she unfastened them from the band. “But you’re only a piece of everybody after all. You haven’t anything really new or particular to yourself, when you’ve done. And it takes up so much time. Last year, this was so pretty! Isn’t anything actually pretty in itself, or can’t they settle what it is? I should think they had been at it long enough.”

“Fashions never were so graceful as they are this minute,” said Mrs. Megilp. “Of course it is art, like everything else, and progress. The world is getting educated to a higher refinement in it, every day. Why, it’s duty, child!” she continued, exaltedly. “Think what the world would be if nobody cared. We ought to make life beautiful. It’s meant to be. There’s not only no virtue in ugliness, but almost no virtue with it, I think. People are more polite and good-natured when they are well dressed and comfortable.”

That’s dress, too, though,” said Desire, sententiously. “You’ve got to stay at home four days, and rip, and be tired, and cross, and tried-on-to, and have no chance to do anything else, before you can put it all on and go out and be good-natured and bland, and help put the beautiful face on the world, one day. I don’t believe it’s political economy.”

“Everybody doesn’t have to do it for themselves. Really, when I hear people blamed for dress and elegance, why, the very ones who have the most of it are those who sacrifice the least time to it. They just go and order what they want, and there’s the end of it. When it comes home, they put it on, and it might as well be a flounced silk as a plain calico.”

“But we do have to think, Mrs. Megilp. And work and worry. And then we can’t turn right round in the things we know every stitch of and have bothered over from beginning to end, and just be lilies of the field!”

“A great many people do have to wash their own dishes, and sweep, and scour; but that is no reason it ought not to be done. I always thought it was rather a pity that was said, just so,” Mrs. Megilp proceeded, with a mild deprecation of the Scripture. “There is toiling and spinning; and will be to the end of time, for some of us.”

“There’s cauliflower brought for dinner, Mrs. Ledwith,” said Christina, the parlor girl, coming in. “And Hannah says it won’t go with the pigeons. Will she put it on the ice for to-morrow?”

“I suppose so,” said Mrs. Ledwith, absently, considering a breadth that had a little hitch in it. “Though what we shall have to-morrow I’m sure I don’t know,” she added, rousing up. “I wish Mr. Ledwith wouldn’t send home the first thing he sees, without any reference.”

“And here’s the milkman’s bill, and a letter,” continued Christina, laying them down on a chair beside her mistress, and then departing.

Great things come into life so easily, when they do come, right alongside of milk-bills and cabbages! And yet one may wait so long sometimes for anything to happen but cabbages!

The letter was in a very broad, thick envelope, and sealed with wax.

Mrs. Ledwith looked at it curiously before she opened it. She did not receive many letters. She had very little time for correspondence. It was addressed to “Mrs. Laura Ledwith.” That was odd and unusual, too.

Mrs. Megilp glanced at her over the tortoise-shell rims of her eye-glasses, but sat very quiet, lest she should delay the opening. She would like to know what could be in that very business-like looking despatch, and Laura would be sure to tell her. It must be something pretty positive, one way or another; it was no common-place negative communication. Laura might have had property left her. Mrs. Megilp always thought of possibilities like that.

When Laura Ledwith had unfolded the large commercial sheet, and glanced down the open lines of square, upright characters, whose purport could be taken in at sight, like print, she turned very red with a sudden excitement. Then all the color dropped away, and there was nothing in her face but blank, pale, intense surprise.

“It is a most wonderful thing!” said she, at last, slowly; and her breath came like a gasp with her words. “My great-uncle, Mr. Oldways.”

She spoke those four words as if from them Mrs. Megilp could understand everything.

Mrs. Megilp thought she did.

“Ah! Gone?” she asked, pathetically.

“Gone! No, indeed!” said Mrs. Ledwith. “He wrote the letter. He wants me to come; me, and all of us, to Boston, to live; and to get acquainted with him.”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Megilp, with the promptness and benignity of a Christian apostle, “it’s your duty to go.”

“And he offers me a house, and two thousand dollars a year.”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Megilp, “it is emphatically your duty to go.”

All at once something strange came over Laura Ledwith. She crumpled the letter tight in her hands with a clutch of quick excitement, and began to choke with a little sob, and to laugh at the same time.

“Don’t give way!” cried Mrs. Megilp, coming to her and giving her a little shake and a slap. “If you do once you will again, and you’re not hystericky!”

“He’s sent for Frank, too. Frank and I will be together again in dear old Boston! But we can’t be children and sit on the shed any more; and it isn’t dear old Boston, either!”

And then Laura gave right up, and had a good cry for five minutes. After that she felt better, and asked Mrs. Megilp how she thought a house in Spiller Street would do.

But she couldn’t rip any more of those breadths that morning.

Agatha and Florence came in from some calls at the Goldthwaites and the Haddens, and the news was told, and they had their bonnets to take off, and the dinner-bell rang, and the smell of the spicy pigeon-stew came up the stairs, all together. And they went down, talking fast; and one said “house,” and another “carpets,” and another “music and German;” and Desire, trailing a breadth of green silk in her hand that she had never let go since the letter was read, cried out, “oratorios!” And nobody quite knew what they were going down stairs for, or had presence of mind to realize the pigeons, or help each other or themselves properly, when they got there! Except Mrs. Megilp, who was polite and hospitable to them all, and picked two birds in the most composed and elegant manner.

When the dessert was put upon the table, and Christina, confusedly enlightened as to the family excitement, and excessively curious, had gone away into the kitchen, Mrs. Ledwith said to Mrs. Megilp,

“I’m not sure I should fancy Spiller Street, after all; it’s a sort of a corner. Westmoreland Street or Helvellyn Park might be nice. I know people down that way, Mrs. Inchdeepe.”

“Mrs. Inchdeepe isn’t exactly ‘people,’” said Mrs. Megilp, in a quiet way that implied more than grammar. “Don’t get into ‘And’ in Boston, Laura! With such an addition to your income, and what your uncle gives you toward a house, I don’t see why you might not think of Republic Avenue.”

“We shall have plenty of thinking to do about everything,” said Laura.

“Mamma,” said Agatha, insinuatingly, “I’m thinking, already; about that rose-pink paper for my room. I’m glad now I didn’t have it here.”

Agatha had been restless for white lace, and rose-pink, and a Brussels carpet ever since her friend Zarah Thoole had come home from Europe and furnished a morning-room.

All this time Mr. Grant Ledwith, quite unconscious of the impending changes with which his family were so far advanced in imagination, was busy among bales and samples in Devonshire Street. It got to be an old story by the time the seven o’clock train was in, and he reached home. It was almost as if it had all happened a year ago, and they had been waiting for him to come home from Australia.

There was so much to explain to him that it was really hard to make him understand, and to bring him up to the point from which they could go on together.