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, leaned forward to say in a low voice, which was audible to Jenny merely because she had reached the trio and was filling Patricia’s cup:
“I’ve heard that there is a girl in this school whose father is a younger son of some titled English family. She ought to be in our class, don’t you think?”
Patricia, whose back was toward the room, could not turn to look at the other pupils, but suddenly she recalled one of them, and so, leaning forward, she also said in a low voice:
“Look at Clare Tasselwood. She’s stiff enough at least to be a somebody.” Gwynette and Beulah agreed.
They both glanced at a tall blonde girl at the table across the room, whose manner was neither disagreeable nor pleasant, expressing merely bored endurance of her present existence. Gwynette’s face brightened. “I believe you are right. Let’s cultivate her!”
Jenny could hear no more of their conversation as she had to go back to the kitchen to refill the silver pot, and when she returned she began to fill cups at a third table, the one at which sat the supposed daughter of a “younger son.” Clare Tasselwood was so deeply engrossed in her own thoughts that she seemed scarce aware that the timid girl at her left was offering her a platter of cold meat. She took it finally with a brief nod; absently helped herself to a slice and passed it to the neighbor on her right.
Jenny found herself feeling sorry for the little girl whom she had noticed at the recreation hour; the one so simply dressed in brown with whom no one had been talking, and about whom Gwynette and her friends had evidently been making uncomplimentary comment. When the new waitress poured that girl’s cup full of chocolate, the little maid smiled up at her and said, “Thank you.”
More than ever Jenny’s heart warmed toward her. “Poor thing! I’d like to be friends with her if she were not a pupil of this fashionable school. She looks more like real folks than some of them do.”
Then, having completed the round with the chocolate pot, the waitress went out to the kitchen to get the tray on which were to be heaped the plates after the first course had been finished. Jenny really dreaded this task, fearing that she would break something, and was relieved to find that the upstairs maid who had been cleaning had come down and was ready to assist.
“Here, Jenny,” Miss O’Hara said, “you follow and give each girl her dessert. Then you come out and eat your own lunch. After that you can go. Tomorrow, being Sunday, I can get along alone, and probably by Monday the new helper’ll be here.”
An hour later Jenny drove away, laughing to herself over her amusing adventure and eager to tell Grandma Sue and Granddad Si all about it.
CHAPTER VII.
JENNY’S TEACHER
It was two o’clock when Jenny skipped to the side porch of the Rocky Point farmhouse. Her grandmother, who was sitting there with her mending basket at her side, looked up with the welcoming smile that she always had for the girl. Dropping down on the wooden bench, back of which hung a blossom-laden garland of Cecil Brunner rose vine, Jenny took off her wide, flower-wreathed straw hat and began fanning her flushed face. The sparkle in her soft brown eyes told the watcher at once that something of an unusual nature had occurred. The old woman dropped her sewing on her lap, pushed her spectacles up under her lavender-ribboned cap and then said with a rising inflection: “Well, Jenny dearie, what have you been up to?”
A peal of amused laughter was the girl’s first answer, followed by a series of little chuckles that tried to form themselves into words but couldn’t. Mirth is contagious and the old woman laughingly said: “Tut! Tut! Jenny, don’t keep all the fun of it to yourself. What happened over to the seminary that was so amusing? I reckoned you’d have sort of a hard tune making things
