Her mother liked Jane to walk to school with Flora and Muriel. She liked her to have them over to play. She had always liked it, from the days of their first paper dolls. There were things that were wrong with Flora and Muriel, too. But they were subtle things that didn’t seem to make much difference. Nevertheless they caused comment. Comment, at least, from her mother and Isabel. Jane had sensed them always, without exactly understanding.
There was something wrong with Flora’s mother, who was perhaps the prettiest, and certainly the most fashionable lady that Jane had ever seen. She was always going out to parties, sweeping out of her front door in rustling draperies, slipping through the crowd of staring children on the sidewalk, wafting a kiss to Flora, and vanishing into the depths of her little blue brougham that waited at the curb. She had a pug for a lap dog and drove out every spring and summer afternoon in a dark blue victoria, with two men up, behind a pair of spanking bays, with a little tip-tilted sunshade of black lace held over her tiny flowered toque of violets. She had always the pug with her, and never Flora, and sometimes a gentleman called Mr. Bert Lancaster, who led cotillions and danced with Isabel occasionally at parties and skated with her sometimes on the Superior Street rink, and made her very happy when he did.
There was something wrong with all Muriel’s family, though her eldest sister, Edith, had been the belle of last winter and her second sister, Rosalie, was going to be the belle of this and had been with Isabel at Farmington and was one of Isabel’s dearest friends. This wrong was easier to fathom. It was because their name was Lester, though everyone knew that it had once been Leischer, and their grandfather, old Solomon Lester, made no bones about it at all, but was just frankly Hebraic, so everyone said who had met him in New York.
Jane knew all this and had always known it. She could not have said how. She was acutely conscious of everything that her mother approved or disapproved. And now that Isabel had come home from Farmington and was frankly recognized as someone to be listened to, Jane was acutely conscious of her opinions, too. It never occurred to her to agree or disagree with them, consciously. There they were. Opinions. Jane bumped into them, tangible obstacles in her path, things to be recognized, and accepted or evaded, as the exigencies of the situation demanded. Just now she didn’t bother at all about Agnes. Jane was very fond of Agnes, but Agnes was, for the moment, a pretext.
“May I be excused?” she asked meekly.
“Use your finger bowl,” said her mother abstractedly.
“What’s the rush, kid?” asked her father again. “Done your algebra?”
Her algebra was Jane’s bête noire. She never told her teacher how much her father helped her. She nodded, rising.
“Understand that last quadratic equation?”
Jane nodded again and kissed her mother goodbye.
“Keep that frock clean,” said her mother, “Don’t climb on fences.”
Jane kissed her father. His face was lean and hard and smelled of shaving-soap. His cheeks were always very smooth in the morning.
“Goodbye, kid. I see in the paper that the Gilbert and Sullivan operas are coming. We’ll have to see The Mikado.”
Jane flushed with pleasure. Even André was forgotten. Jane had only been to the theatre four times before in all her life. Once when she was very young to see Elsie Leslie in Little Lord Fauntleroy and twice to see Joseph Jefferson in Rip van Winkle and once last year to hear Calvé in Carmen, with all the family, because there was an extra seat, on Thanksgiving afternoon.
“Really, Papa? Honestly?” Her face was shining. Then she heard the doorbell ring. Her heart sank, in spite of her glowing prospects. That was Flora and Muriel at the front door, of course. Minnie, the waitress, went to open it. There was a shuffle, a whispered joke, and a giggle in the hall. It was certainly Flora and Muriel. Jane walked slowly out of the room.
“I wish that child would drop Agnes Johnson,” she heard her mother say and caught the irritated rustle of her father’s paper in reply.
“Just a jiffy!” she called, and raced upstairs, two steps at a time, for her homework.
“Don’t wake Isabel!” called her mother.
When Jane came downstairs again her father was struggling into his coat in the front hall. Flora and Muriel sat mutely on the bench beneath the hat-rack, school books in hand. Minnie handed her her lunch for recess. A little wicker basket with a leather strap, containing two jelly sandwiches, Jane knew, and a piece of cake and her favorite banana.
Flora and Muriel rose to meet her. Her father was humming, gaily, regarding the children before him with a benevolent smile. As they reached the front door he broke into jocular song.
“Three little maids from school are we,
Pert as a school girl well can be,
Filled to the brim with girlish glee,
Three little maids from school!”
Flora and Muriel were regarding him dispassionately. Jane was just a little bit ashamed of him. In the presence of her contemporaries, Jane felt almost grown up. Her father opened the door for them with mock ceremony.
“Everything is a source of fun.
Nobody’s safe for we care for none.”
He tweaked her pigtails affectionately.
“Life is a joke that’s just begun!
Three little maids from school!”
They were out and had run down the steps before he could go any further. Jane’s sense of embarrassment had deepened. Flora was fifteen and was already talking of putting up her golden curls. Muriel had a real suit, with a skirt and Eton jacket, and her dresses reached almost to her boot tops.
