INSIDE THE COTTAGE

It was what Nancy called the pluperfect hour of the day; that is, of a rainy day. The curtains of the living-room were drawn over the windows, the mellow lamplight dealing kindly with their faded folds. The rain, which had brought with it an early autumn chill, beat rhythmically against the panes, and gurgled contentedly from a water spout, as if it were revelling in the fact that it had had the whole countryside to itself for four-and-twenty hours.

Alma had washed her yellow hair, and had built a fire to dry it by. Nancy, in her dressing-gown and slippers, with her own brown mane braided into a short, thick club, was icing the chocolate cake, helping herself generously to the scrapings in the earthenware bowl. Mrs. Prescott was embroidering. This was her greatest accomplishment, learned in a French convent. Knitting bored her to death, and darning drove her crazy, but she could sit by the hour stitching infinitesimal petals on microscopic flowers, and turning out cake mats, tea-cloths and fancy collars by the score. Faded only slightly by her forty-odd years, she was still an exquisitely pretty woman, with a Dresden-china face, marred ever so little by the fine lines which drooped from the corners of her delicate nose to the corners of her childish mouth. Her golden hair was barely silvered, her skin as fresh and rosy as Alma’s, and her round little wrists, and pink-tipped fingers, Alma might have envied. The lacy dressing-gown she wore, which, at the slightest motion, shook out a faint little whiff of some expensive French perfume, struck an odd note in the shabby room, where the couch sadly displayed a broken spring, and not the most careful placing of furniture that Nancy could devise entirely concealed the holes in the faded carpet.

“We ought to put a glass cover over Mother, the way some people cover French clocks,” Nancy said laughingly. “You’re much too valuable to get any of the dust of every-day life on you, Mamma.”

“I’m getting old, my dear. I only think of my daughters now,” said Mrs. Prescott, with a little sigh and pushing a curly wisp of hair back from her face. “I shall be putting on spectacles soon.”

“Catch you! You’d go blind as a bat before you’d do any such violence to your beauty. You’re like Alma. I had to argue for half an hour to-day to make Alma wear her raincoat. It wasn’t becoming, and she’d far rather die of pneumonia than look like a ”

“A hippopotamus,” said Alma. “That’s what I look like in the old thing. The sleeves dangle over my hands like a fire hose.”

“Nancy, I’ve come to a definite conclusion in regard to you and Alma, for this winter,” said Mrs. Prescott, laying down her embroidery and trying to look practical and decided.

“How much will it cost?” Nancy’s eyes twinkled.

“It’s not a question of money.”

“Nothing ever is with Mamma and Alma,” Nancy thought, but she was silent, and continued to lick the chocolate off her spoon composedly.

“I have thought the whole thing over very carefully, and I am quite sure that the matter of money must not be weighed against the value which it would have for you girls.”

“It’s not a trip to Europe, is it, Mamma?” asked Alma, quite as if she expected that this might be the case. Indeed, a trip to Europe would have been no more incredible to Nancy than her mother’s plan, which Mrs. Prescott proceeded to unfold.

“You see, my dears, living as we do, you girls are absolutely cut off from the opportunities which are so essential to every girl’s success in life. This has been a great worry to me. You are growing older, and you are forming no acquaintances that will be of value to you. For this reason I have decided that the expense of sending you both for a last year, you understand to a good school, a smart school, a school where Alma can meet girls who will count for something in social life is an expense that must be met.”

“But heavens, we’ve had all the ordinary schooling we need,” exclaimed Nancy in amazement. “If if I could just have a few months’ tutoring so that I could take my college exams in the spring I could work my way through college easily ”

“I don’t want you to go to college, Nancy,” said Mrs. Prescott irritably. “What in the world is the use of a whole lot of ologies and isms and ruining your looks over a lot of senseless analyzing and dissecting and everything ”

“I won’t be studying anything useless, Mother dearest. But don’t you see that it will be ever so much easier for me to get a position as a teacher if I can show a Bachelor’s degree instead of just a smattering of French, or a thimbleful of ancient history?”

“There’s no reason why you should think of becoming a teacher,” answered Mrs. Prescott. “And I wish you wouldn’t talk about it it’s so dreadfully drab and gloomy.”

“But I want to make my living in some way.”

“If you and Alma marry well, there won’t be any reason why you should make your living.”

“But, Mother, we can’t count on chance, like that. Suppose Alma and I never met a rich man whom we could love we’d be helpless.”

“A year at Miss Leland’s will give both of you plenty of opportunities. You’ll meet girls there whom you ought to know, girls who will invite you to their houses, through whom you’ll meet eligible young men ”

“The expense of paying for board and tuition at Miss Leland’s would be the least of the digging we’d have to do into the family purse. We’d be under obligations to people, which we would never be in a position to repay we’d be no better than plain, ordinary sponges. I I couldn’t bear it. Besides, the fees at Miss Leland’s are terribly high. I could go to college for almost two years on what I’d pay for one year at Miss Leland’s and all that we’d get at that school would be a little French, a smattering of history, dancing and fudge parties.”

“And extremely desirable acquaintances.”

“But, Mother, we’d never be able to keep up with them on their own scale of living,” pleaded Nancy, with a hopeless conviction in her heart that she was talking to the winds. “Girls like Elise Porterbridge and Jane Whiteright have an allowance of a hundred a month, and anything else they want, when they’ve spent it.”

“You’ve got money on the brain, Nancy,” said Alma, shaking her curls off her face. “You are a regular old miser.”

“Well, you’re right, perhaps. I I hate to, heaven knows, but we do have to think about it, Alma. It’s the poor gamblers who are always counting on a lucky chance that are ruined. I want to be prepared for the worst and then if something nice turns up, why, wouldn’t that be ten times better than if, when we had been counting on the best, the worst should happen?”

“You see, dears,” Mrs. Prescott had entirely missed the point of Nancy’s last remark, “Uncle Thomas is very old, and I am sure I am quite sure that he will relent.”

“Oh, Mother!” Poor Nancy flung up both hands in despair.

“I have entered you both at Miss Leland’s, so, really, there is no use in arguing about it any more. And I’ve already sent the check for the first term. Everything is decided. I didn’t tell you until to-night, just because I was afraid that this hard-headed old Nancy of mine would try to argue me out of it; when I know that it’s the best and wisest thing to do. Nancy, darling, please don’t scowl like that. You aren’t angry with Mother, are you?” A soft little hand was laid on Nancy’s muscular brown one, and in spite of herself the girl relented, with a whimsical smile and a sigh.

“I’d like to see anyone who could be angry with you for two minutes,” she said, burrowing her brown head in the lace on her mother’s shoulder.

“That nasty old Uncle Thomas has been angry with me for ten years, very nearly. Isn’t he a dreadful old man?” laughed Mrs. Prescott, tweaking Nancy’s ear.

“We’ll have to get a lot of new clothes if we are going to boarding school.” Alma, having spread the towel on the floor, reclined full length in front of the fire, and meditated with satisfaction on the delightful prospect.

“Mamma, if I could just once have a hat with a feather on it a genuine plume, I’d be happy for the rest of my days.”

“Wouldn’t Alma be lovely?” cried Mrs. Prescott delightedly. “Oh, you don’t know how I long to give my daughters everything everything. One thing you must have, Alma, is a black velvet dress made very simply, of course. They are so serviceable,” she flung this sop to Nancy, who, with her head thrown back, was good-humoredly tracing phantom figures in the air with her forefinger.

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” she observed, agreeably. “Oh, darling Uncle Thomas, kindly lend us a million. We need it, oh, we need it every hour we need it!”

“Let’s set one day aside for shopping,” was Alma’s bright suggestion; she felt that this would be her element. “We’ll go into the city in the morning, get everything done by noon, lunch at Mailliard’s and then go to a matinee. I haven’t seen a play since Papa took us to see Humpty Dumpty, when Nance and I were little things.”

“I’ve got eighty-three cents,” said Nancy. “I’d like to see the color of your money, ma’am, before we do any gallivanting.”

“Well, I’m not going to sit here gazing at that cake another minute, please give me a slice, Nancy, sugar-pie, lambkin, just a wee little scrooch of it,” begged Alma, snuffing the handsome chocolate masterpiece of Nancy’s culinary skill. Nancy took off a crumb and gave it to her, which elicited a wail of indignation from Alma.

“Well, here you are. And it’ll give you a nice tummy-ache, too,” predicted Nancy, cutting off a generous slice. “Good heavens there’s the door-bell, Mother!” She stopped, knife in hand and listened, petrified. “Who on earth can be coming here at this time of night, and all of us in our dressing-gowns. Alma, you’re the most nearly dressed of all of us. Here, pin up your hair. There it goes again. Fly!”

Alma seized a handful of hairpins, and thrusting them into her hair as she went, ran out of the room.

Nancy and her mother listened with eyebrows raised.

“Must be a letter or something,” Nancy surmised. “You don’t suppose it couldn’t be ”

Alma forestalled her conjectures, whatever they might have been, by entering the room with her face shining and an opened letter in her hand.

“It’s an invitation, Nancy,” she beamed. “Isn’t that exciting? Elise Porterbridge wants us to come to a ’little dance she’s giving next Friday night.’ And the chauffeur is waiting for an answer.”

“Funny she was in such a hurry,” remarked Nancy. “I suppose someone fell out, and she’s trying to get her list made up. What do you think, Mother?”

“Why, it’s delightful. I want you to know Elise better anyway. You know her aunt married the Prince Brognelotti, and she will probably do everything for that girl when she makes her debut.” Mrs. Prescott rustled over to the writing-table and despatched a note in her flowing, pointed hand.

“Hush, Mamma, the chauffeur will hear you,” cautioned Nancy with a slight frown. It always pricked her when Alma or her mother said snobbish little things, and roused her democratic pride the stiffest pride in the world.

“A dance,” carolled Alma, when the door had slammed again behind the emissary of the Porterbridge heiress. “A real, sure enough dance!” She seized Nancy by the waist and whirled her about; then suddenly she stopped so abruptly that Nancy bumped hard against the table. Alma’s face was sober, as the great feminine wail rose to her lips:

“I haven’t a thing to wear!”

“You must get something, then,” said Mrs. Prescott, positively, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “I want you to look lovely, Alma. It’s dreadful to think of a girl with your beauty not being able to appear at your best all the time.” Mrs. Prescott had a habit of speaking to Alma as if she were a petted debutante of nineteen, instead of just a pretty, care-free youngster of sixteen. She looked at Nancy, who was the treasurer of the family, much as an impecunious queen might look at her first Lord of the Exchequer while asking him for funds to buy a new crown.

“Why can’t you wear your blue crepe,” was Nancy’s unfeeling answer. “It’s very becoming, and you’ve hardly worn it.”

“If you call that an evening dress,” Alma cried, on the verge of tears, “you’ve a vivid imagination that’s all I’ve got to say. I just won’t go if I have to look dowdy and home-made. I wouldn’t have any kind of a time you know that ”

“You could cut out the neck and sleeves, and get a new girdle. I’m going to do that to my yellow, and with a few flowers there’ll be some lovely cosmos in the garden it’ll look very nice. And you’re sure to have a good time, no matter what you wear, Alma.”

“Oh, she can’t go if her clothes aren’t just right, Nancy that’s all there is to it,” said Mrs. Prescott.

“Clothes,” declared Alma, her voice quavering between tears and indignation, “are the most important things in the world. It doesn’t matter how pretty a girl is if her dress is dowdy, no one will notice her.”

“And you must remember, Nancy, that she will be compared with girls who will be sure to be wearing the freshest, smartest and daintiest things,” added Mrs. Prescott. Nancy began to laugh. They argued with her as if she were some stingy old master of the house instead of a slip of a girl of seventeen. But there was some truth in what Alma had said, and Nancy knew what agonies would torment her if she felt that she fell a whit below any girl at the dance in point of dress. Nancy could sympathize with her there only it was quite out of the question that both she and Alma should have new dresses. She thought hard a moment. There was not very much left in the family budget to carry them through the remainder of the month but then she might let the grocer’s and butcher’s bills run over, or, better still, she might charge at one of the city department stores where the Prescotts still kept an account. It would be too bad if Alma’s first dance should be spoiled, even if the couch did go in its shabby plush for another month or so. Five yards of silk would come to about fifteen dollars new slippers not less than seven, silk stockings, two that made twenty-four dollars thirty to give a margin for odds and ends like lining and trimming. Alma would need a pretty evening dress when she went off to school, and she might as well have it now.

“Well, listen, you poor old darling,” she said slowly. “To-day’s Saturday. If we trot in town on Monday and get the material, we could easily make up a pretty dress for you to wear on Friday night. Let’s see ”

“She could have a pale blue taffeta,” Mrs. Prescott suggested, who was in her element when the subject turned to the matter of clothes, “made perfectly plain with a broad girdle or you could have a girdle and shoulder-knots of silver ribbon and wear silver slippers with it. It would be dear with a round neck, and tiny little sleeves, and a short, bouffant skirt. You could wear my old rose-colored evening wrap, it’s still in perfect condition.”

“That would be scrumptious!” shrieked Alma, flinging her arms about them both. “You two are angelic dumplings, that’s what you are.”

“Monday morning, then,” said Nancy. “We’d better take an early train.”

When her mother and sister had gone to bed, she took out her little account book and began to figure, then all at once she flung the pencil down in disgust at herself.

“Alma’s right. I’m turning into a regular old miser. I’m not going to bother I’m not going to bother. But but somebody’s got to.” She frowned, staring at the small old-fashioned picture of her father, which smiled gaily at her from the top of the desk. “You left that little job to me, didn’t you?” she said aloud, and the memory of some words her father had once spoken to her laughingly came back to her mind “You’re my eldest son, Nancy mind you take care of the women.”

“Only I’m jolly well sick of being a boy, Daddy,” she said, as she jumped into bed. “I’ll let the first person who steps forward take the job.”