Poor, Dear Margaret KirbyNorris, Kathleen Thompson
General
Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby
Norris, Kathleen Thompson
American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories
"That reminds me, Jim," Miss Ives was quite herself again, "that when I
was in the bath-house a few moments ago your Dancing Girl and that
pretty little girl who is visiting her came into the next room. You
know how flimsy the walls are? I could hear every word they said."
"If you'd been a character in a story, Ju, you'd have felt it your duty
to cough!"
"Well, I didn't," grinned Miss Ives; "not that I wanted to hear what
they were saying. I didn't even know who they were until I heard little
Miss Carter say solemnly, 'Ethel, I used to want mamma to get that
Forty-eighth Street house, and I used to want to do Europe, but I think
if I had ONE wish now, it would be to do something that would MAKE
everybody know me--and everybody talk about me. I'd LOVE to be pointed
out wherever I went. I'd love to have people stare at me. I'd like to
be just as popular and just as famous as Julia Ives!'"
"She HAS got it badly, Ju!" the doctor observed.
"She has. And it will be fuel on the flames to have me start to swim
back to shore while she is swimming as hard as she can to the raft!"
said the lady, tucking the last escaping lock under her cap and
springing up for the plunge that started the home trip.
It was only a little after midnight that night when Julie, lying
wakeful in the sultry summer darkness, was startled by a person in her
room.
"It's Emma, Miss Ives," said Mrs. Arbuthnot's maid, stumbling about,
"Mrs. Arbuthnot wants you."
"She's ill!" Julie felt rather than said the words, instantly alert and
alarmed, and reaching for her wrapper and slippers.
"No, ma'am. But the doctor feels like he ought to go down to the fire,
and she's nervous--"
"The fire?"
"Yes'm," said Emma, simply, "the windmill is afire!"
"And I sleeping through it all!" Miss Ives was still bewildered,
fastening the sash of her cobwebby black Mandarin robe as she followed
Emma through the passage that joined her suite to the Arbuthnots'.
"Ann, dear--Emma tells me the laundry's on fire?" said she, entering
the big room. "I had no idea of it!"
"Nor had we," the doctor's wife rejoined eagerly. "The first we knew
was from Emma. Jim says there's no danger. Do you think there is?"
"Certainly not, Ann!" Julie laughed. "I'll tell you what we can do,"
she added briskly. "We'll wheel you down the hall here to the window;
you can get a splendid view of the whole thing."
The doctor approving, the ladies took up their station at a wide hall
window that commanded the whole scene.
Outside the velvet blackness and silence of the night were shattered.
The great mill, ugly tongues of flame bursting from the door and
windows at its base, was the centre of a talking, shouting,
shrill-voiced crowd that was momentarily, in the mysterious fashion of
crowds, gathering size.
"Wonderful sight, isn't it, Ann?"
"Wonderful. Does this cut off our water supply, Emma?"
"No, Mrs. Arbuthnot. They're using the little mill for the engines now."
"What did they use the big mill for, Emma?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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