Christian fiction; Domestic fiction; Families -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
“I can shop at home. I came here to be with you.”
“Then let’s drive,” he decided with a loving smile. “Where would you
like to go? Anything you want to see?”
“No—or wait. Yes, there is. I’ve a fancy I’d like to drive past the
house where that little girl I met on the train lives. I’d like to
see exactly what she’s up against with her firm little chin and her
clear, wise eyes and her artistic ways.”
“At it again, aren’t you, mother? Always falling in love and chasing
after your object. You’re worse than a young man in his teens”; and
he smiled understandingly. “All right; we’ll hunt her up, mother;
only we shan’t have much time to stop, for I have to be here sharp at
twelve thirty. Do you know where she lives?”
“Yes, I have her address here,” said his mother, searching in her
silver bag for the card on which Cornelia had written it. “But I
don’t want to stop. It wouldn’t do. She would think me intruding.”
The young man took the address, and ordered a taxicab; and five
minutes after Cornelia entered the door of her home with her arms
full of bundles from market and grocery a taxicab crawled slowly by
the house, and two pairs of eyes eagerly scanned the high, narrow,
weather-stained building with its number over the front door the only
really distinct thing about it.
“The poor child!” murmured the lady.
“Well, she sure is up against it!” growled the son, sitting back with
an air of not looking, but taking it all in out of the tail end of
his eye the way young men can do.
“And she wants to be an interior decorator!” said the mother, turning
from her last look out the little window behind.
“She’s got some task this time, I’ll say!” answered the son. “It may
show up more promisingly from the interior, but I doubt it. And you
say she’s been to college? Dwight Hall, didn’t you say, where Dorothy
Mayo graduated? Some come-down! It’s a hard world. Well, mother, I
guess we’ve got to get back or I’ll miss my appointment;” and he gave
the chauffeur directions to turn about.
More rapidly they passed this time, but the eyes of the woman took
in all the details, the blank side wall where windows ought to have
abounded, the shallow third story obviously with room for only one
apartment, the lowly neighbors, the dirty, noisy children in the
street. She thought of the girl’s lovely refined face, and sighed.
“One might, of course, do a great deal of good in such a
neighborhood. It is an opportunity,” she murmured thoughtfully.
Her son looked amused.
“I imagine she’ll confine her attention to the interior of her own
home if she does anything at all. I’m afraid, if I came home from
college to a place like that, I’d beat it, mother mine.”
His mother looked up with a trusting smile.
“You wouldn’t, though!” she said sunnily, and added thoughtfully:
“And she won’t either. She had a true face. Sometime I’m coming back
to see how it came out.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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