Growing Up: A Story of the Girlhood of Judith MackenzieConklin, Nathaniel, Mrs.
General
Growing Up: A Story of the Girlhood of Judith Mackenzie
Conklin, Nathaniel, Mrs.
Christian life -- Fiction; Conduct of life -- Fiction; Girls -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
Sunday was a wonderful day. She listened to the new preacher, and the
new Sunday-school was certainly very pleasant. She spoke to a little
girl she had never noticed before, and gave a rose to Julia Weed,
whom she had always disliked. She was trying to be like Mrs. Lane.
In the evening she stayed at home from church with her mother,
because her mother’s head ached; and when, for the first time in her
life, she proposed reading her Sunday-school book to her mother, she
was both pleased and rebuked to hear her reply, “Oh yes, I should
like it! I can’t read evenings, and I often think how interesting
your books look.”
“And if I can’t finish it to-night, may I read tomorrow night?” Jean
asked eagerly.
“If I am not too tired.”
“But it will rest you.”
“Perhaps so. It will be something new.”
Something new for her to be thoughtful about her own hard-working
mother! And she had to imagine herself in somebody else’s home to
think of it.
What a day Monday was! She was busy all the morning, “helping,” and
she found it good fun. In the afternoon she wrote a long letter to
Sophie, and she had so much to tell that she filled three sheets. In
the evening she read aloud to her mother, and her father listened,
after he read his paper, and said it was a “jolly good book.”
When she left the room to go to bed, she said, “Good night!” Usually
she forgot it. She was careful to remember “thank you,” and “please.”
It was not her turn to iron. To-morrow would be a long, hot ironing
day, and there were so many starched things this week. Lottie was in
a hurry to finish the pink muslin she was making for herself. If she
should offer to iron two hours, and let Lottie sew—but how she hated
to iron!
Still, she could only stay with these people two weeks—and there was
nothing else Lottie would like so much; she and Lottie had not been
very good friends lately, and this would “make up.” She was the one
to make up, for she had been cross and had refused to do her work in
order to let Lottie go to the picnic. Minnie did it, and let Lottie
go, and Jean had felt mean ever since.
But she was only fourteen, and it was vacation. But Mrs. Lane
said—and now she wished she hadn’t!—that nobody ever had a vacation
from doing kind things.
She could help iron next week. This was her week.
“I guess it’s God’s week!” This was one of Jean’s new thoughts. Going
into your own home like a new somebody was very hard work; she almost
wished she were not a summer boarder, that she had stayed at home!
And this last thought was so funny that the people down-stairs heard
her laughing.
“Jean is a happy child,” said her mother.
“Yes, she seems to have a new kink,” replied her father. “She is
taking a sudden interest in everything. I used to think she hated the
farm and everything about it. The farm is all I’ve got to give my
girls, and it hurts me to have them care nothing about it.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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