CHAPTER IV

“AMONG BRIDESMEN AND KINSMEN AND BROTHERS AND ALL”

For three days Janet’s life in her new surroundings was neither dull nor lonely. She saw but little of her aunt, and practically nothing of Gladys, who showed unmistakably that she did not consider “Miss Lochinvar” worth bothering about; nor was Sydney’s manner to her different from his taciturnity toward his own family. But Jack, Viva, and Jerry lost no time in learning to admire her--they all three worshiped Jan by the end of her second day among them.

With Mr. Graham Janet passed two happy evenings talking of her mother, surprising him with her knowledge of the most minor details of his own boyhood and early home, and rousing him into telling funny stories of happenings of which she did not know, to the boundless surprise of his own children. At the end of that time her uncle had grown accustomed to her presence, and, though his affection for his sister was one of the strongest ties of his life, they had been separated so long that other interests made more pressing claim upon him. Added to this was the fact that matters on Exchange were threatening; there was danger of “a bear market.” Janet heard him say this, and construed it by her Kansas experience of crop failures to mean “a bare market,” and she pictured to herself empty stalls and New York threatened with shortage in food. Mr. Graham was vitally interested in keeping prices up, and became so preoccupied that Janet received from him only the pleasant word night and morning accorded his own children. Gwen, heroically, and with more pleasure to herself than she expected, entertained her cousin for three days. Then her absorbing interest in her own pursuits asserted itself; she began her sixth novel--none of them had ever passed the fourth chapter, and but one reached it--and forgot Jan completely in the solitude of her own room when she got home from school.

It had been decided that Janet should have at least a week in which to accustom herself to exile before facing the girl world in the Misses Larned’s school. Gwen had suggested to her father that Janet be clad suitably before this ordeal, and he had promptly written a generous check for that purpose to supplement at shops where the Grahams had no account any deficiencies in what they wished to purchase where bills were charged. Nurse Hummel and Gwen had gone down once with Janet to begin this shopping, but to “Miss Lochinvar’s” bewilderment, she learned that many trips were required to fit her out as a New York schoolgirl, and after this first one she and Hummie had to go alone. Gladys flatly refused to go abroad with her cousin until these changes in her costume had been made, and was most anxious that she should not be seen by any of her schoolmates, but Gwen did not conceal the fact that they had a Western cousin consigned to them for the winter, and the three girls whom Gwen most disliked, and Gladys stood most in awe of, set out at once to call upon her, moved by curiosity rather than friendliness.

“Miss Hammond, Miss Gwen, and Miss Ida Hammond and Miss Flossie Gilsey is down-stairs to see you; they sint their cards. They do be asking for Miss Janet, though not be name,” said Norah, presenting six bits of pasteboard through the crack of Gwen’s door.

“Oh, for mercy’s sake! Has anything come home for that prairie-chicken to put on?” exclaimed Gladys, flushing with annoyance; she chanced to be at that moment in her sister’s room.

“I don’t believe so,” said Gwen composedly. “They had to alter the house dress we got ready-made. Still, it doesn’t matter for those girls.”

“Gwendoline Graham, you are enough to provoke a saint! Of all the girls in school, they are the ones who would notice most, and they have the most money,” cried Gladys.

“And are the most vulgar and the stupidest about their lessons,” finished Gwen. “I don’t see why you mind what such people think. However, I’ll go up and see what I can do for Jan.” And she arose, putting aside her lap tablet with the air of a martyr.

“She can’t wear anything of yours; she isn’t tall enough, and they would know our things, anyway,” said Gladys. “I suppose we’ve just got to let her come in that shabby best dress of hers. But do tell her not to say or do anything queer, or tell any of those stories she tells the children about riding broncos and playing Indian in the fields--no, prairies! Make her understand she has to be like other people, and these are swell girls.”

“If she’s used to wearing feathers and war-paint we can’t make her take to civilization right off--no Indian does that,” said Gwen wickedly, for Gladys never could grasp satire. “But, you know, I think she has nice manners, simple and not as if she thought of herself. And the Hammonds and Floss Gilsey are more swollen than swell.” And with this parting witticism, Gwen ran up the hall.

“Jan, Jan, here are three girls come to call on you,” she said, putting her lips to her cousin’s door. “Hurry up, and come down to see them.”

Jan opened her door at once. She was writing a long letter home, and her cheeks were too red to indicate perfect peace of mind.

“I’ll just pumice-stone this ink stain off my finger,” she said, “and then I’m ready. If ever I sympathized with any one, it was with Mr. Boffin when he told John Rokesmith he didn’t see what he did with the ink to keep so neat when he wrote. I’m ashamed of myself, and mamma says I ought to be, but I can not keep my fingers--this middle one, anyway--free from ink when I write. I guess I get so interested I dive down to the bottom of the ink-well without knowing it. Who are these girls?” As she had talked, Janet had scrubbed energetically, and now turned to go down with Gwendoline, without any additional prinking beyond a hasty smooth of her rebellious hair. Her dress was a blue-serge skirt and a cotton shirt-waist, although it was October; it never occurred to her, used as she was to seeing her girl friends in a girlish manner, that anything more was required of her in the matter of toilet.

Gwen eyed her quizzically, thinking with amusement and annoyance of what these would-be fine ladies down-stairs, who could not have understood Jan’s reference to Dickens, would say if she let her go down thus. It was dawning upon Gwen’s inquiring mind that many things in the world were not quite as they should be, and that the scales in which lots of people weighed other people and things were badly weighted on one side.

“I am afraid you will have to put on your bestest gown, Jan,” she said. “They would probably drop dead if they saw you no more fixed up than that, and it would be a nuisance to have to prove they weren’t murdered here. Get out your finest things, and I’ll help you.”

“My finest things aren’t fine enough to make much difference,” said Jan, who had not had her own eyes shut to facts since she came. “However, I’ll do my best not to disgrace you, Gwen.”

Together they fastened Jan into the light-blue cashmere which her mother had made for her to wear to possible children’s parties with her cousins. Jan could not help smiling at herself in the glass, while Gwen was buttoning up the waist in the back, remembering this, and what was Gladys’s idea of a party, and how little she considered herself a child at thirteen.

“You really look like peaches and cream with that light blue against your skin,” said Gwen admiringly when the task was completed. “They can’t say you’re not awfully pretty.”

“Don’t flatter, Gwen. And imagine a brown maid peaches and cream! Come on, then. Have you any instructions to give as to manners?” asked Jan.

“No,” said Gwen wisely. “Yours are always nice, because you’re so real and unaffected--not that there’s the least hope of their knowing that simplicity is nice, though.”

“My cousin, Miss Howe; Miss Hammond, Miss Ida Hammond, Miss Gilsey,” said Gladys, doing the honors with unusual dignity because she felt sure it would be needed to cover Jan’s deficiencies in worldly knowledge.

Janet murmured her salutations confusedly, badly handicapped at the start by the formality of so many “misses” when she expected to be introduced all round by first names.

“How do you like New York, Miss Howe?” asked Daisy Hammond, estimating Jan’s gown rapidly but accurately. “It must be very different from the West?”

“Yes, but I like it,” said Jan warily.

“New York is so much bigger,” added Ida Hammond, with a trying air of superiority.

“Than the West? Oh, no; the West is very large,” said Jan demurely, to Gwen’s delight.

“Are you fond of the theater, Miss Howe?” asked Flossie Gilsey, throwing herself in the breach.

“I never have been; we are going, Gwen says, sometime this winter. But I love to act; we do plays in the barn chamber, my brothers and sisters and I. It’s loads of fun. I’d love to see a real play, but it costs too much to go to the city, and then buy tickets to the theatre,” said honest Jan, quite unconscious of disgrace in the fact of poverty. Gladys turned crimson as her ill-bred guests cleared their throats emphatically and giggled a little. Gwen flushed wrathfully, but not at Jan.

“That is like Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy; do you remember what fun they had acting in Little Women?” she asked tactfully.

“It is so long since we read Little Women--not since we were children; I don’t remember it very well,” said Daisy. “What do you like best, Miss Howe? Dancing? Sport? What is your special line?”

“The clothes-line, I guess,” said Jan, laughing outright, for it struck her as ridiculous to be asked what was her specialty, “as if it was a menagerie, and she wanted to know whether I was a long-necked giraffe or a short-horned gnu,” she said afterward. “I help take in clothes quite often. But I like all kinds of fun--dancing in the house in winter; and games, and racing, and riding out of doors. I guess any sort of fun--just having fun--is my special line.”

Gladys only barely succeeded in checking the groan this horrible speech called forth, but Gwen laughed openly. She did not think it quite wise in Jan to have said that about taking in clothes, but she was so indignant at the thinly veiled rudeness of the girls to her cousin and the guest in her house that she did not care, as long as Jan had the best of it.

The callers rose to go, not being in the least certain whether they were being made game of or not, but thoroughly satisfied that they detested as much as they despised this Western girl, who looked at them with smiling candor in her undeniably pretty eyes, and seemed unconscious of offense.

“You poor dear thing!” said Daisy Hammond in the hall to Gladys, having bade Gwen and “Miss Howe” good-by in the parlor. “It is really awful for you to have to civilize her! She is a perfect savage. Whatever will you do with her when she comes to school? Do you suppose she has any education at all? She certainly has no manners.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Isn’t it awful?” said Gladys, tears of wrath and self-pity in her eyes. “She hasn’t had any chance; that’s the only excuse. For goodness’ sake, don’t tell the other girls!”

“Tell them! My dear, not for worlds!” said Flossie, as they started down the steps on their way to find the others of their set and impart to them how “perfectly awful the Grahams’ cousin was.”

Jan had wandered into the rear parlor when her first visitors had left her, and so had not heard the remarks to Gladys, which had been perfectly audible to Gwen.

When she got her sister up-stairs that young lady freed her mind.

“Gladys Graham,” she said, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself not to stand up for your own cousin, and not to have any more self-respect than to let those geese be impertinent to her and to us in our own house! Jan didn’t do anything dreadful. She needn’t have said that about the clothes, I’ll admit, but I suppose she was disgusted, and well she might be. Besides, she’s the kind of girl that can’t help seeing the funny side, but she isn’t one bit mean. Those girls acted as if she were as far below them--as far as the sea-level from Mont Blanc. And I only wish I could have boxed their ears. If you don’t stop letting those Hammonds and Floss and that crowd impose on you, you’ll be a goose all your days. Just you wait and see if you don’t find out I’m right. I am just ashamed of you--helping them sit on papa’s sister’s daughter!”

Gladys flared up. “She’s perfectly disgraceful, that’s what Janet Howe is! Saying she was too poor to go to the theater, and took in clothes! I wonder she didn’t say she took in washing! Maybe they do, and the ladies give her their old clothes,” she cried.

“Gladys, stop this instant! I won’t let you talk that way. Jan’s a trump, and I can see it if I do neglect her. I only wish we were as nice as they all must be,” cried Gwen.

“Well, if you like that sort of girl, you may have her. I won’t take her out, and I won’t go anywhere with her, and I think papa is downright mean to impair her on us,” Gladys sobbed.

“If you mean _impose_, why don’t you say so? I honestly think we are the ones whom Jan impairs,” said Gwen, restored to good-nature by the chance to correct one of Gladys’s many slips of tongue. And thus ended Jan’s introduction to New York society.