had her breakfast in bed, you know. I think it’s delightful to have your breakfast before you get up, and dress as slowly as you like. I wish mamma would let me do it.’
‘What does she do after she gets dressed in her rows of old lettuce—I mean her old rows of lettuce?’ asked Polly.
‘Do? Why really, Polly, you are too stupid! What do you suppose she did? What everybody else does, of course.’
‘Oh!’ said Polly, apologetically.
‘How old is Mrs. Pinkerton?’ asked Margery.
‘Between nineteen and twenty. There is not three years’ difference in our ages, though she has been married nearly two years. It seems so funny.’
‘Only nineteen!’ cried Bell. ‘Why, I always thought that she was old as the hills—twenty-five or thirty at the very least. She always seemed tired of things.’
‘Well,’ said Laura, in a whisper intended to be too low to reach Mrs. Winship’s tent, ‘I don’t know whether I ought to repeat what was told me in confidence, but the fact is—well—she doesn’t like Mr. Pinkerton very well!’
The other girls, who had not enjoyed the advantages of city life and travel, looked as dazed as any scandalmonger could have desired.
‘Don’t like him!’ gasped Polly, nearly falling off the stump. ‘Why, she’s married to him!’
‘Where on earth were you brought up?’ snapped Laura. ‘What difference does that make? She can’t help it if she doesn’t happen to like her husband, can she? You can’t make yourself like anybody, can you?’
‘Well, did she ever like him?’ asked Margery; ‘for she’s only been married a year or two, and it seems to me it might have lasted that long if there was anything to begin on.’
‘But,’ whispered Laura, mysteriously, ‘you see Mr. Pinkerton was very rich and the Dentons very poor. Mr. Denton had just died, leaving them nothing at all to live on, and poor Jessie would have had to teach school, or some dreadful thing like that. The thought of it almost killed her, she is so sensitive and so refined. She never told me so in so many words, but I am sure she married Mr. Pinkerton to save her mother from poverty; and I pity her from the bottom of my heart.’
‘I suppose it was noble,’ said Bell, in a puzzled tone, ‘if she couldn’t think of any other way, but—’
‘Well, did she try very hard to think of other ways?’ asked Polly. ‘She never looked especially noble to me. I thought she seemed like a die-away, frizzlygig kind of a girl.’
‘I wish, Miss Oliver, that you would be kind enough to remember that Mrs. Pinkerton is one of my most intimate friends,’ said Laura, sharply. ‘And I do wish, also, that you wouldn’t talk loud enough to be heard all through the cañon.’
The colour came into Polly’s cheeks, but before she could answer, Mrs. Winship walked in, stocking-basket in hand, and seated herself in the little wicker rocking-chair. Polly’s clarion tones had given her a clue to the subject, and she thought the discussion needed guidance.
‘You were talking about Mrs. Pinkerton, girls,’ she said, serenely. ‘You say you are fond of her, Laura, dear, and it seems very ungracious for me to criticise your friend; that is a thing which most of us fail to bear patiently. But I cannot let you hold her up as an ideal to be worshipped, or ask the girls to admire as a piece of self-denial what I fear was nothing but indolence and self-gratification. You are too young to talk of these things very much; but you are not too young to make up your mind that when you agree to live all your life long with a person, you must have some other feeling than a determination not to teach school. Jessie Denton’s mother, my dear Laura, would never have asked the sacrifice of her daughter’s whole life; and Jessie herself would never have made it had she been less vain, proud, and luxurious in her tastes, and a little braver, more self-forgetting and industrious. These are hard words, dear, and I am sorry to use them. She has gained the riches she wanted,—the carriages and servants, and tea-gowns, and hammered silver from Tiffany’s, but she looks tired and disappointed, as Bell says; and I’ve no doubt she is, poor girl.’
‘I don’t think you do her justice, Mrs. Winship; I don’t, indeed,’ said Laura.
‘If you are really attached to her, Laura, don’t make the mistake of admiring her faults of character, but try to find her better qualities, and help her to develop them. It is a fatal thing when girls of your age set up these false standards, and order their lives by them. There are worse things than school-teaching, yes, or even floor-scrubbing or window-washing. Lovely tea-gowns and silver-backed brushes are all very pretty and nice to have, if they are not gained at the sacrifice of something better. I should have said to my daughter, had I been Mrs. Denton, “We will work for each other, my darling, and try to do whatever God gives us to do; but, no matter how hard life is, your heart is the most precious thing in the world, and you must never sell that, if we part with everything else.” Oh, my girls, my girls, if I could only make you believe that “poor and content is rich, and rich enough.” I cannot bear to think of your growing year by year into the conviction that these pretty glittering things of wealth are the true gold of life which everybody seeks. Forgive me, Laura, if I have hurt your feelings.’
‘I know you would never hurt anybody’s feelings, if you could help it, Mrs. Winship,’ Laura answered, with a hint of coldness in her voice, ‘though I can’t help thinking that you are a little hard on poor Jessie; but, even then, one can surely like a person without wishing to do the very same things she does.’
‘Yes, that is true,’ said Mrs. Winship, gravely. ‘But one cannot constantly justify a wrong action in another without having one’s own standard unconsciously lowered. What we continually excuse in other people we should be inclined by and by to excuse in ourselves. Let us choose our friends as wisely as possible, and love them dearly, helping them to grow worthier of our love at the same time we are trying to grow worthier of theirs; because “we live by admiration, hope, and love,” you know, but not by admiring and loving the wrong things.
‘But there is the horn, and I hear the boys. Let us come to luncheon, and tell our good news of Elsie.’
Long before the boys appeared in sight, their voices rang through the cañon in a chorus that woke the echoes, and presently they came into view, bearing two quarters and a saddle of freshly killed mutton, hanging from a leafy branch swung between Jack’s sturdy shoulder and Geoff’s.
‘A splendid “still hunt” this morning, Aunt Truth!’ exclaimed Jack. ‘Game plenty and not too shy, dogs in prime condition, hunters ditto. Behold the result!’
The girls could scarcely tell whether or no Laura was offended at Aunt Truth’s unexpected little lecture. She did not appear quite as unrestrained as usual, but as everybody was engaged in the preparations for Elsie’s welcome there was a general atmosphere of hilarity and confusion, so that no awkwardness was possible.
The tool-shop resounded with blows of hammer and steel. Dicky was under everybody’s feet, and his ‘seven or ten frogs,’ together with his unrivalled collection of horned toads, were continually escaping from their tin pails and boxes in the various tents, and everybody was obliged to join in the search to recover and re-incarcerate them, in order to keep the peace.
Hop
