"I'm not tired a bit," she said truthfully. "I just let go all over
and stay that way. It isn't sitting any stiller than I do lots of
days, when Grandfather has me stay close by him, and keep very still
so he can write. Why, it seems downright sinful," she went on
earnestly, "to earn beautiful gray clothes by just sitting still!
But you would have to have somebody, anyway, wouldn't you?"
"Of course we would!" said Mrs. Morrow, picking up her crayon again.
"Indeed, we have to have two most of the time."
They all kept very quiet for a while after that, Joy sitting still
in her robes of state, a slim young Justice presiding over an as yet
undrawn Senate, and the Morrows working hard at her. She had been
posing for another half hour, when there came a whirlwind of steps
up the stairs, and the door banged open.
"Mrs. Morrow, can you let me have some fixative?" called a voice;
and Joy moved her eyes cautiously, and saw a pretty, panting girl in
the doorway. She looked like an artist, too, for she had a smudge of
paint on one vivid cheek, and her black hair was untidily down over
her gipsy eyes.
"Nice model you've got--good skin tints--oh, don't bother about the
fixative if you're working. I see it."
She darted in, past Joy, snatched a bottle half full of something
yellow, and was out again before any one could speak.
"I'm hurrying," she called superfluously back as she fled to the
floor below. "Giving a dance tonight."
Joy, most mousy-quiet in her chair, mentally registered another
requirement toward being the kind of girl she ought to be. There
were such lots of wonderful things to learn!
She went to the Morrows regularly every day after that, six days in
all. She told Grandmother where she was, not what she was doing. It
didn't occur to her that Grandmother would mind, but she thought it
would be pleasanter to surprise her, and say, "See the lovely dress
I earned all myself, posing for the Morrows!"
Meanwhile, Grandmother, pleased at her little girl's brightened face
and general happiness of demeanor, asked no questions.
"You've been one of the best models we ever had, my dear," said Mrs.
Morrow in her deep, unceremonious voice, when the last day came.
"And it occurred to me that you might be too hurried when the last
day came to do your shopping yourself. So I just ran uptown and got
your pretties for you."
It was not for a long time that Joy discovered the regular pay of a
model to be fifty cents an hour, and the sum total of her gray
costume to have been--it was late for summer styles, so they were
marked down--fifty-three dollars and ninety cents. But Mrs. Morrow
had said to Mr. Morrow, who usually saw things as she did, even
before she explained them:
"Alton Havenith would never let that dear little thing have anything
as modish as those clothes. He'd keep her for a living illustration
to his poem-books till he died. And we're making a lot on that
Sagawinna Courthouse thing.... And we haven't any daughter."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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