“I like your street, Agnes,” said Jane.
Then they buckled down to the Aeneid. They were reading the end of Book IV. The part about Dido’s funeral pyre. Agnes could read it so well that it almost made Jane cry, at the end.
“Vixi et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi,
Et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago.”
Agnes crooned the sonorous lines, then translated slowly.
“I have lived and accomplished the task that destiny gave me and now I shall pass beneath the earth no common shade.”
“That’s beautiful,” said Jane. “Nice and proud. That’s the way you ought to feel if you were dying. Not snivelling, you know, or frightened, or crying over spilled milk.”
“It didn’t do her much good,” said Agnes, turning over a page or two. “The next book begins ‘In the meantime, Aeneas unwaveringly pursued his way across the waters.’ He didn’t turn back, you know, though he saw the light from the flames.”
“I don’t care,” said Jane stoutly, “what Aeneas did. He was a poor thing anyway. But Dido died like a lady. A gallant lady. I hope I’ll never cry over spilled milk, Agnes.”
“I don’t believe you will,” said Agnes. Her funny freckled face was bent very admiringly on Jane. “You’re as gallant as anyone I know. Always running uphill. I bet I see you in Bryn Mawr in October. I bet you get there.”
Jane was suddenly electrified to see André turn the corner and come walking up the street. He waved his cap to the two girls.
“Agnes!” said Jane. “Did you ask André?”
“This afternoon,” said Agnes. “Dad telephoned that he couldn’t go with us. He was kept at the newspaper.”
“But who is going with us?” asked Jane.
“André,” said Agnes.
“Just you—and me—and André?” asked Jane again.
“Yes,” said Agnes. “And we have to cook our own dinner first. Mother’s down at the office.”
André turned in at the gate. Agnes sprang up to meet him. Jane sat very soberly on the top step, pricking a brown paint blister with her finger nail, her eyes on the worn porch floor. Her mother wouldn’t like this, thought Jane. Her going with André and Agnes, alone, to the Thomas concert. Jane didn’t like it, herself. Jane knew perfectly well she ought to have some older person with her when she went out in the evening. She felt very much troubled.
“Hello, Jane,” said André. “Can’t you smile?”
Jane tried to.
“Can you scramble eggs, André?” asked Agnes.
“Just watch me!” said André. “If you’ve got some ham I can make eggs Benedictine.”
“If we haven’t,” said Agnes, “we can get it at the grocery.”
They all went into the house. Agnes’s house always looked just a little mussy. Not mussy like the Lesters’, because people lived all over it, but mussy in quite another way, as if nobody lived in it quite enough. The living-room was often dusty and the chairs and sofas weren’t pushed around quite right. They looked as if the people they belonged to never had time to sit down on them. The dining-room had a funny unused look. The fernery needed water and the dishes were piled a little askew in the golden-oak built-in sideboard. André and Agnes and Jane were going to eat in the kitchen. The kitchen was the nicest room in the house.
It was quite large and the stove was always beautifully polished. There were two rocking-chairs in it, near the window that looked over the yard. The curtains were made of blue and white gingham and a blue-and-white tablecloth covered the kitchen table. Mrs. Johnson’s mending basket stood on one corner. Agnes pitched it off onto one of the rocking chairs.
“Set the table, Jane,” said Agnes. She was peering into the icebox. “André,” she said solemnly, “there is ham.”
André tied a dishcloth around his waist and began to call for eggs and butter and lemon. He was going to make Hollandaise sauce. He picked up an eggbeater and poured his ingredients into a big yellow bowl. Jane was devoutly thankful that Flora and Muriel couldn’t see him. Agnes was taking the vegetable salad out of the icebox. André had views on salad dressing. Jane set the table very neatly and arranged the snow pudding on a plate. She went out on the back porch and picked six tiny leaves of Virginia creeper to trim the eggs Benedictine. There wasn’t any parsley. André was mixing the salad dressing when she came in again. Agnes had put the coffee on the stove. Jane couldn’t cook, at all. Agnes could do everything and André was certainly displaying latent talents that she had never suspected.
“This is like Paris,” he said to her with a grin. She had so often asked him if things were. But she would never have thought of putting that question in regard to the Johnsons’ kitchen. “This is just like the studio, except that there’s running water and a better stove.”
They all sat down together. The blue-and-white tablecloth looked very gay. The vegetable salad was used as a centre piece, a heaping pyramid of red beets and green beans and ecru cauliflower, piled on crisp lettuce leaves. The eggs Benedictine were perfectly delicious. Agnes’s coffee was awfully good.
Jane felt her spirits rising in spite of her conscience. She knew that her mother wouldn’t even approve of this meal alone in the house with just André and Agnes. She wouldn’t like their eating in the kitchen and she’d think it was terribly funny that André could cook. But Jane really couldn’t feel that there was anything to disapprove of in all that. Going downtown alone, at night, with just another girl and boy—that was different. Still, Jane’s spirits were rising. It was certainly lots of fun.
Jane washed the dishes, later, and Agnes wiped them. They wouldn’t let André help them, so he sat in one of the rockers and made funny suggestions, and, after asking Agnes’s permission, smoked two cigarettes. André had begun to smoke with his father last summer in Paris. He didn’t do it
