The Other GirlsWhitney, A. D. T. (Adeline Dutton Train)
General
The Other Girls
Whitney, A. D. T. (Adeline Dutton Train)
Family life -- Fiction; Women -- Fiction
"Yes, and while the new lasts Lufton'll be awful polite," returned
Marion. "He likes to see his girls look stylish, I can tell you.
When things begin to shab out, then the snubbing begins. And how
they're going to help shabbing out I should like to know, dragging
round amongst the goods and polishing against the counters? and
who's going to afford ready-made, or pay for sewing, out of six
dollars a week and cars and dinners, let alone regular board, that
some of 'em have to take off? Why there isn't enough left for shoes!
No wonder Lufton's always changing. Well--there's one good of it!
You can always get a temporary there. Save up a month and then put
into port and refit. That's the way I do."
"But what does it come to, after all's said and done? and what if
you hadn't the port?" asked Hannah Upshaw, the girl with the shawl
on, who never wore suits.
Marion Kent shrugged her shoulders.
"I don't know, yet. I take things as they come to me. I don't
pretend to calculate for anybody else. I know one thing, though,
there is other things to be done,--and it isn't sewing-machines
either, if you can once get started. And when I can see my way
clear, I mean to start. See if I don't!"
The train stopped at the Pomantic station. The young man in the gray
clothes rose up, took something from under the car-seat and went
out. What he had with him was a carpenter's box. It was the same
youth who had greeted Ray Ingraham from beneath the elm branches. As
the train got slowly under way again, Marion looked straight out at
her window into Frank Sunderline's face, and bowed,--very modestly
and sweetly bowed. He was waiting for that instant on the platform,
until the track should be clear and he could cross.
What he caught in Marion's look, as she turned it full upon him,
nobody could see; but there was a quieter earnest in it, certainly,
when she turned back; and the young man had responded to her
salutation with a relaxing glance of friendly pleasantness that
seemed more native to his face than the frown of a few minutes
before.
Marion Kent had several selves; several relations, at any rate, into
which she could put herself with others. I think she showed young
Sunderline, for that instant, out of gentler, questioning, almost
beseeching eyes, a something she could not show to the whole
car-full with whom at the moment of her entrance she had been in
rapport, through frills and puffs and flutters, into which she had
allowed her consciousness to pass. Behind the little window he could
only see a face; a face quieted down from its gay flippancy; a face
that showed itself purposely and simply to him; eyes that said,
"What was that you thought of me just now? _Don't_ think it!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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