“I had a lovely time, Mr. Furness,” she said, as they drew up in front of the house on Pine Street. He didn’t seem to hear her.
“Good night, Mrs. Lester,” said Jane politely. “I had a lovely time.”
Mrs. Lester held her hand a moment and patted it.
“You’re a good little girl, Jane. I’m sure you can be trusted.”
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Lester,” said Jane. And then, “Good night, André.”
“Good night,” said André. “I’ll call you up in the morning.”
“Why does Mrs. Lester think you can be trusted?” said Isabel curiously, as she was fishing in her bag for the door-key.
“I don’t know,” said Jane. “I can’t imagine.”
Isabel opened the door. As they walked down the hall their mother called over the bannisters.
“Was it fun, girls?” She was sitting up for them in her lavender wrapper. She followed Isabel into her bedroom to talk it all over. Isabel seemed to have lots to say.
“I never saw Freddy so gone on anyone as he is on Rosalie. I think he’s really in love with her. Of course, I don’t say he would be if she didn’t have money, but—” Jane’s mother closed Isabel’s door.
Jane went into her own room alone. She could hear their whispering voices, broken by low laughter, long after her light was out. It was funny, Jane thought, but it was perfectly true. Telling lies made you trustworthy.
III
I
“I don’t know why you want to go,” said Jane’s mother, “anyway.”
“Just to the Thomas concert,” said Isabel.
“And down in the street cars,” said Jane’s mother, “in your pretty frock.”
“Well—I do,” said Jane.
It was a party of Agnes’s that was under discussion. Agnes had asked her, yesterday in school, to come up to dinner that evening and go down to the Auditorium later to the Thomas concert. Agnes’s mother was going to work that night. She couldn’t use her seat. Agnes’s father would take them. Jane’s mother and Isabel had argued about it all last evening and now they were beginning all over again at the breakfast table.
“Oh, let her go,” said Jane’s father. “It can’t hurt her.”
Jane smiled at him gratefully. Mrs. Ward sighed and poured herself a second cup of coffee.
“You don’t make it any easier, John,” she said, “to control the children.”
“Papa, can I go?” asked Jane, appealing directly to the higher court, a little impertinently.
“Of course she can go, can’t she, Lizzie?” said her father, smiling disarmingly o’er the morning Tribune.
“Oh—I suppose so,” said Mrs. Ward, with a resigned shrug. We won’t have much more of it. Agnes goes to Bryn Mawr in the fall.”
Jane’s eyes met her father’s with a little gleam of understanding. But there was no use in opening the college issue, just then. It was late April, and Jane was almost ready for her final examinations. She was going to take them, anyway. Miss Milgrim insisted on that. She rose from the table to telephone to Agnes.
“I’m coming up early,” she said, “and I’m going to bring my Virgil. We can read over that passage.” Jane loved Latin, but she wasn’t nearly as good at it as Agnes. She wasn’t nearly as good as Agnes at anything. Agnes was terribly bright. Agnes was going abroad that summer, to tutor a little girl. She was going to England and Germany and Switzerland. Both she and Jane were awfully excited about it. Agnes was eighteen.
Jane left the house quite early with her Virgil. She walked up the Drive and west through the Park to Center Street. It was a beautiful, breezy day, with a wind off the lake. The elm trees were in tiny feathery leaf. The yellow forsythia was in bloom. The heart-shaped leaves of the lilacs were very soft and small. They hadn’t begun to bud yet. Jane left the Park and crossed the Clark Street car-tracks and wondered, as she did so, why they formed such a social Rubicon. Her mother and Isabel never had any opinion of anyone who lived west of Clark Street. It was the worst thing they had to say of Agnes.
Agnes lived in a little brown wooden house in a street of other little brown and grey wooden houses. Some of them had quite large yards and here and there was a newly planted garden. The street was lined with cottonwood trees. Their flickering leaves looked very bright and sticky in the April sunshine. The wooden sidewalk was covered, here and there, with a dust of cottonwood seed. Agnes’s street was very like the country.
Agnes’s house had a little front porch and Agnes was sitting on it in an old maple rocking chair. Agnes was reading a French book. Jane knew what it was, Extracts Selected and Edited from Voltaire’s Prose, by Cohn and Woodward.
Agnes was reading it quite easily, without a dictionary. Agnes was going to take some advanced standing examinations in French in the fall. She closed the book with a bang as Jane came up the front steps. Jane sat down on the top one.
“This is lovely,” said Jane. “Like summer.” It really was. The sun fell hot and bright on the wooden steps. Agnes’s father had put out some crocuses along the little path that led to the gate. Some little boys were playing baseball in the empty lot across the street. Agnes’s next-door neighbor was hanging out the wash—great wet flapping sheets that waved like banners in the spring breeze. Behind her a row of children’s dresses, pink and green and yellow and blue and four pair of men’s white underdrawers danced a fantastic ballet on
