"When I had to stop," went on the Other Girl, quietly. "I think I
felt sorriest about the history, though it broke my heart to give up
Latin. I don't know what you'll think, but I translated six lines in
your Cicero last night. I did--I couldn't help it. I haven't the
least idea I got them right, but I translated them."
Decidedly this was interesting. Couldn't help translating Cicero!
Glory gasped with astonishment. She faced squarely about and gazed at
her shabby little neighbor.
"Where do you go to school?" she demanded. Wherever it was, she was
thinking that was the school Aunt Hope would like her to go to.
"At the East Centre Town rubber factory," the Other Girl smiled
wistfully. "And oh, dear! that makes me think--can you smell rubber?"
Glory sniffed inquiringly. She certainly could detect a whiff of it
somewhere. "Yes--yes, I think I do," she said.
"Then I'm going ahead. It's me," the Other Girl cried sharply. "I
ought to have remembered. _I_ wouldn't enjoy sitting beside a rubber
factory if I was somebody else--if I was you. I forgot--I'm sorry."
She stood up and tried to pass out into the aisle in front of Glory,
but Glory would not let her.
"Sit down, please--_please_. I don't smell it now, and anyway I like
it. It's a variety. I'm tired of the perfume of white violets! If you
don't mind, I wish you'd tell me some more about when you had
to--stop, you know. I suppose you mean stop going to school, don't
you?"
"Yes. It was when my father was killed in an accident. I had to stop
then. There's only mother and me and 'Tiny Tim.' I went to work in
the rubber factory--it was six months ago. I had just begun getting
really into study, you know."
The quiet voice was unsteady with intense wistfulness. The Other
Girl's eyes were gazing out of the car window as if they saw lost
opportunities and yearned over them. Glory could not see the longing
in them until they turned suddenly toward her and she caught a
wondering glimpse of it.
"We had never had much, you see, but after father was killed--after
that there was only mother and me, and mother is sick. So of course I
had to stop going to school. I should like to have had enough so I
could teach instead of working in a factory--"
This much said, the Other Girl shrank into herself as if into a
little shabby shell. The distance between the two girls seemed
abruptly to have widened. All at once Glory's hands were delicately
gloved and the Other Girl's bare and red; Glory's dress trim and
beautiful, and the Other Girl's faded and worn; Glory's jacket
buttons rich and handsome, the Other Girl's top button split. It
seemed all to have happened in a moment when the Other Girl woke up.
How could she have forgotten herself so and talked like that!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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