Part 12

"O, yes. I don’t want anything elaborate, only nice, you know. And Susan’s cousin can come to wait on the table. She does it very nicely, and doesn’t charge much of anything." Priscilla hurried to her writing desk, and pulled out her note paper. A party without Peggy! Could there be a better way of asserting herself and proving how little she was moved by the loss of Peggy’s friendship. She dashed off the invitations as hastily as if she were afraid to give herself time for reflection.

Peggy was not long in hearing of Priscilla’s luncheon party, and the non-appearance of her invitation was a secret she kept to herself. That she was hurt, goes without saying. The two girls had been friends for years, and, up to this time, Peggy’s ground of complaint had been the excess of the other’s affection, rather than any lack. It was hard to believe that Priscilla was planning so pronounced a slight. She tried to make herself believe that there was some mistake, but the passing days brought the conviction that the omission was deliberate, and that the chief purpose of the little festivity was her open humiliation.

This would have been bad enough, but, to make matters worse, Peggy’s conscience took a hand. An uncompromising monitor was this same conscience, sternly denying Peggy the luxury of self-pity, and arraigning her in a fashion little short of merciless. Ardently it pleaded Priscilla’s cause. Her suspicions of Elaine were not without foundation. Peggy herself might have shared them had it not been for the extraordinary story to which she had listened. In any case, she had failed to show the patience due one friend from another. She who prided herself on her tact, had been brusque and tactless. Knowing poor Priscilla’s weakness, she had not been on her guard. She had lost her friend, and for her comfort had the reflection that it was, in part at least, her own fault.

It was a blue week for Peggy, and hardly better for Priscilla. She studied cook books, planned out her menu, and tried to think that her low spirits were due to dreadful doubts as to Susan’s salad dressing, while all the time she knew that she missed Peggy. She wanted to ask her opinion as to whether to order the ices from Bird’s or Connally’s, and to consult her about the place cards. How loyally Peggy would have counselled and lent her aid. Many a time she had helped some distracted hostess till she had barely time to fly home and change her dress before the appointed hour.

Saturday was cloudless, a fact which Priscilla came near resenting. Grey skies and a drizzle of rain would have harmonized better with her mood. Mrs. Combs was puzzled by the overcast face her daughter brought down to breakfast.

"What is it, child? Anything wrong with your plans?"

"No, I guess everything’s all right," Priscilla responded in the most doleful of voices.

"A pleasant hostess is the chief factor in making pleasant guests. I advise smoothing a few of those wrinkles out of your forehead when you attend to the rest of your toilet," advised Mrs. Combs, smilingly, and she was more puzzled than ever when Priscilla received her counsel with a sigh.

The luncheon hour was set for one o’clock, but at half past twelve, the girls began to arrive, formality never being much in evidence on Friendly Terrace.

"Wonder if Peggy’s here yet," Ruth remarked, as she stood before Priscilla’s mirror, giving her hair the little caressing pats whose importance every girl understands.

"I don’t believe Peggy is coming." It was Blanche Estabrook who made the remark, apparently without realizing its importance.

Ruth and Amy whirled about. "Not coming!" they exclaimed in a breath.

"She was on Elaine Marshall’s back steps talking to her as I came by. She had on a blue gingham, and that didn’t look very much like going out to luncheon." Blanche ran down the stairs, leaving Amy and Ruth gazing blankly at each other.

"Now I think of it, I believe something has been wrong all the week," Amy exclaimed. "Priscilla has kept to herself, hasn’t she? I don’t remember her walking home from school with Peggy."

"I don’t believe she has. To think of her not asking Peggy!" Ruth gave a refractory lock a jerk which threatened to undo, all in a moment, the result of much patient labor. "I really think I wouldn’t have come myself if I’d known."

Downstairs the early arrivals were chatting gaily. Ruth and Amy descended together to join them, feeling little in the mood for festivity of any sort. "If it had been anybody but Peggy," Amy said, angrily on the way down, and Ruth replied, "Seems as if there must be some mistake, Amy. Perhaps she’ll come after all."

The doorbell rang several times before one o’clock, but no breathless Peggy appeared, apologizing for the delay, and smiling on everybody. Ruth made no effort to be entertaining, but sat watching the door, and making absent replies to the girl who sat next her. Amy, too, was uneasy, and curious little lulls occurred in the conversation, a phenomenon almost unheard of when a group of girls are together.

"Well, I believe we’re all here," Priscilla announced at last. "Excuse me for a minute, while I tell Susan." She rose and stepped into the hall. In an instant Amy had followed, closing the door behind her.

"Priscilla!" Amy’s excited tones were plainly audible in the room where the girls sat waiting, though not her words. "You don’t mean that these girls are all the party."

"Certainly they’re all." Priscilla eyed her friend suspiciously.

"But there are thirteen of us. Do you think I’d sit down thirteen at the table, and on the thirteenth of the month, too." Amy was very much in earnest. Her plump, good-natured face was actually pale. "I tell you I wouldn’t think of such a thing."

"I believe there are thirteen. Rae Fletcher couldn’t come." Priscilla had recovered herself in a moment. "But that silly old superstition, Amy. You don’t mean--"

"Yes, I do mean it. And there’s lots of other people who feel just the same about it." Amy suddenly opened the door of the front room. "Come here, Ruth, we want you a minute."

Ruth made her appearance, expecting to be consulted on a very different matter. Amy’s tragic explanation took her by surprise, and she smiled a little. "O, well," she was beginning, and then checked herself, as the possibility of turning Amy’s superstitious terrors to good account flashed upon her.

"I simply won’t do it," Amy was insisting. "And on the thirteenth of the month, especially. I wouldn’t have another peaceful minute all the year. Ruth, why don’t you say something?"

"Why don’t you ask somebody else and make fourteen." Ruth offered the suggestion nonchalantly, though her pulse had quickened.

"There isn’t anybody I can ask at the very last minute. Mother’s gone to Mrs.--"

"Why not ask Peggy?"

Amy’s excitement over the fatal number of Priscilla’s guests had made her temporarily forgetful of her earlier reason for disquiet. At Ruth’s master-stroke, she gasped with admiration, and promptly seconded the suggestion. "O, yes, ask Peggy. She’s just the one."

Priscilla stood with downcast eyes, and breathlessly her two friends awaited her answer. For a moment the outcome was uncertain. Priscilla was quite capable of resenting such advice, and earlier in the week would undoubtedly have done so. But if Peggy’s conscience had been an uncomfortable companion, Priscilla’s had not been less active, and her anticipated triumph in having a party without Peggy had proved bitter as Dead Sea fruit. When she spoke, her voice was tremulous, in spite of her efforts to make it sound indifferent.

"O, I don’t believe Peggy will come. We had a little misunderstanding, you see."

"It wouldn’t do any harm to try," suggested Ruth, still painstakingly matter-of-fact, while Amy added with less tact, "If anybody would do it, it’s Peggy. She’s the forgivingest thing."

Peggy was at the dinner table when an agitated knocking sounded at the side-door. A breathless voice in the hall made inquiries of Sally. "Somebody to see you, Miss Peggy," was Sally’s grudging announcement. She disapproved of people who came at meal time.

To Peggy’s amazement it was Priscilla waiting in the hall, Priscilla in her best white frock, and with a pallor that was rather appealing. "I know you won’t do it," was her opening remark.

"Won’t do what, Priscilla?" Peggy was to be pardoned if her manner was a little formal.

"There are thirteen of us, and Amy won’t sit down at all. But it serves me right if my party’s spoiled, after treating you that way."

Priscilla gulped. Peggy’s manner became less dignified.

"You mean that there’s thirteen and you want me for the fourteenth."

"Of course you won’t come. But it serves me right to have you say no." Priscilla bit her lip to keep from crying.

Peggy threw a hurried glance at the mirror. "Will my hair do? I’ve got to change my dress, of course."

"You’re going to do it?" Priscilla fairly screamed. "O, Peggy! You’re an angel. You can’t think how wretched I’ve been all the week, and how ashamed. O, you darling! Can you ever forgive me?"

They rushed upstairs, their arms about each other’s waists. "Don’t make me cry," pleaded Peggy, gulping down a sob, "because I really mustn’t take time to wash my face, you know. I’ll wear my pink; I can get into that in a shake."

It was only fifteen minutes after the hour named on the invitations, that Priscilla’s guests sat down to a very dainty and highly successful luncheon. "Do you know, I thought you weren’t coming," Blanche Estabrook said to Peggy as they took their seats.

"I’m so sorry to be late and keep everybody waiting," Peggy answered with gentle regret, and that was all most of them knew about the belated invitation. But there was no doubt in the minds of any of the gay crowd that fourteen was a peculiarly lucky number, on any day of the month.

*CHAPTER XVII*

*ELAINE UPSETS TRADITION*

Winter as a rule seems long to people in trouble. That year Elaine Marshall found it endless. The steady cold that set in early in January seemed to her relentless, almost vindictive. It was vain to tell herself that spring would return as always, that the branches of the willows by the river would become clouds of misty green, that violets would start in the woods beyond, and the strips of lawn along the Terrace would take on the hue of spring. Intellectually she knew all this to be true, but in her heart was the hopeless conviction that this winter would last forever.

Elaine was having a hard time, and the hardest part of it all was that, however far she looked ahead, she could see no prospect of relief. Mrs. Marshall’s economy was of the inconsistent sort, noticeable in people who late in life have begun to realize the value of money. She scrimped over the pennies, and then threw away dollars for something which even to Elaine’s inexperience was plainly not indispensable.

Things counted up incredibly. There was the coal bill, for example. Mrs. Marshall had said at first that the dealer must have made a mistake, and then, that he evidently gave short measure, and, finally, she had looked at her daughter with eyes half-frightened. "We can’t freeze, Elaine."

"No, we’ve got to keep warm," the girl returned, but her voice was absent. She was mentally calculating how far their yearly income would stretch at this rate, and the thought of the weeks for which there would be no provision rushed over her with sickening dismay.

She took up her embroidery and fell to work. Since filling Mrs. Summerfield Ely’s first order Elaine had received several others from that lady and her friends. She had outgrown her early foolish humiliation over the idea of doing such work for pay. Mrs. Ely treated her with as scrupulous a courtesy as she would have showed any other girl, and gave her work the praise which to the conscientious is always the best of the rewards of toil. At the same time, Elaine’s judgment, sharpened by necessity, was grasping the fact that this dainty work, well enough to fill in the leisure minutes, was a very poor dependence when the bread and butter problem was under consideration.

Peggy came in upon her one afternoon, when the dreariness of the grey winter sky seemed to Elaine an inadequate symbol of her own sombre mood. Peggy’s arrival was like a rift in the clouds, letting the blue shine through, a real sunbeam visitation. Smiles were not easy for Elaine these days, but her face did brighten noticeably at the sight of Peggy.

"You don’t mind if I keep on, I know," she said as Peggy took the nearest chair. "Mrs. Laughlin is in a hurry for this."

"I don’t mind your keeping on as far as I’m concerned," Peggy replied, viewing her narrowly. "But I _do_ mind the way you’re squinting over that embroidery. What’s the matter? Are your eyes hurting you?"

Elaine let the embroidery fall, closing her eyes, and further protecting them by a sheltering hand. "Hurt?" she repeated. "I should think so."

"What’s the matter?"

"Too much close work, I suppose. I’ve kept at it till late two or three nights this week."

"It isn’t going to pay you," warned Peggy, "to ruin your eyes for what you can make out of embroidery."

"It doesn’t pay anyway," sighed Elaine. "You wouldn’t believe how many hours it takes me to earn ten dollars." She had given herself as long a recess as she dared, and she fell to work again, her eyes blinking and suffused with moisture as if reluctant to reassume their duties.

Peggy’s silence was unusually prolonged. "I had a new experience this week," she remarked casually at last. "I had a job offered me and refused it."

"A job?" exclaimed Elaine with interest.

"A job?" echoed Mrs. Marshall, her tone indicating horror. There was a startling vulgarity about the term, she reflected. Young ladies might have employment, though occupation was still better. But to get a job was not to be thought of. She shuddered.

"In my Uncle John’s office," Peggy explained. "He’s a real estate dealer, you know, and he’s especially interested in the new suburb they’re opening up, Lakeview, they call it. He thinks there’s quite an opening in that work for women, and he painted the prospects in such dazzling colors that I really hated to say no."

"Why did you say it, then?" asked Elaine, her manner proving that the inquiry was by no means perfunctory. Mrs. Marshall uttered an exclamation, apparently indicating that the reason was self-evident.

"O, I wouldn’t stop before I finished high school for anything. And Uncle John wants somebody right away. If the chance had come after I had graduated I’d have jumped at it, for I’ve got to earn some money before I go to college."

Elaine folded her work deliberately and laid it on the table. She set her thimble atop, with particular care that it should be exactly in the centre of the pile. Then she looked hard at Peggy.

"What about me?" Elaine demanded abruptly. "Do you think he’d consider me?"

"Elaine!" gasped Mrs. Marshall. But Peggy, overjoyed that the fish had risen so readily to the bait, failed to notice the horrified protest of the mother’s tone.

"Would you really take such a position, Elaine?" she cried. "Why, I should think you’d have the best chance in the world. And Uncle John would be such a splendid person to work for. He’s a fine business man, everybody says, but not the petrified sort. He’s kind and interested and ready to make allowances--"

"Elaine!" said Mrs. Marshall, breaking in on Peggy’s eulogy. This time it was impossible to ignore the tone in which she spoke her daughter’s name. It was like the crack of a whip.

Both girls looked at her. Poor Mrs. Marshall sat very straight, her thin cheeks aflame. Her expression betokened a conflict between incredulous anger and hurt pride.

"Elaine, you must be taking leave of your senses. What would your grandfather have said at the idea of one of his blood"--Mrs. Marshall hesitated, then evidently concluded that only the objectionable commercial term Peggy had made use of, was equal to the occasion--"one of his descendants getting a _job_ in a real estate office?"

"I think grandfather would probably have said that circumstances alter cases," replied Elaine promptly.

Not having had the pleasure of the acquaintance of Mrs. Marshall’s late father, Peggy was unable to surmise what that old gentleman’s attitude would have been under such conditions. But she hastened to suggest, "Lots of awfully nice girls go into business offices nowadays, Mrs. Marshall."

Elaine was in a reckless mood. "I don’t know as it matters what other girls do. It’s a question of what I’ve got to do. We can’t sit here and starve, just because grandfather was rich."

"Elaine!" cried Mrs. Marshall with a horror which was at least sincere. To acknowledge, even to Peggy, the pressing character of their need, seemed to the poor lady a shocking piece of indelicacy. Her weak chin quivered, as she struggled with her emotions. Peggy possessed enough of the divine art of putting herself in another’s place to realize that the consternation, so absurd from her standpoint, was justified by those views of life to which Mrs. Marshall had always adhered. She racked her head for something which would soften the blow.

"If Elaine is going to work anywhere, Mrs. Marshall, she couldn’t be in a better place than Uncle John’s office. He’d be good to anybody, but, of course, he’d be especially interested in Elaine as long as she’s a friend of mine."

"Young people nowadays," quavered Mrs. Marshall, her sense of injury goading her to injustice, "are not sufficiently mindful of what they owe the family name."

Elaine’s flippant laugh jarred Peggy’s sense of propriety. She looked at her reproachfully, but Elaine would not meet her eye.

"I suppose that’s because we have to think what we owe ourselves," she suggested airily. "Clothes and something to eat, to say nothing of carfare."

"And don’t you think," asked Peggy, hurling herself into the breach, "that a girl who does hard things when she has to, and keeps brave and plucky about it, is a credit to any family? Seems to me that her ancestors, whoever they were, would have reason to be proud of her."

There was a clarion ring in Peggy’s voice. Mrs. Marshall looked at her doubtfully, surprised that enthusiasm could be kindled over what to her mind was a disgrace. But Elaine’s expression betrayed a sense of guilt.

"Don’t try to make a heroine of me, Peggy," she protested. "I’m not brave, nor plucky, nor anything of the kind. It’s only that I’ve got to have the money. If you think there’s any chance, let’s go to see your uncle right away before he gets anybody else."

The process of bringing Mrs. Marshall to agree to this suggestion occupied some time. Suspecting the weakness of her arguments, the poor lady fell back on tears and reminiscences. The two girls listened to detailed accounts of the lavish expenditure that had prevailed in her father’s household, the big dinners, the imported gowns, the liveried coachman. "And to think that my child should be--getting a job," wailed Mrs. Marshall. "O, what would poor papa have said?" It was not so much, perhaps, that the girls’ arguments finally had effect, as that the violence of her emotion had reduced her to the point of exhaustion, which accounted for the fact that Elaine and Peggy were at last allowed to depart on their errand without protest.

Peggy’s uncle, Mr. John Mannering, was a big grey-haired man, with eyes that twinkled boyishly, and a voice that could be kind or commanding or both in one, on occasion. He asked Elaine a few questions which had the result of making her feel hopelessly ignorant and incompetent, and then sat considering her with a closeness of attention whose curious impersonality resulted in relieving Elaine from all feeling of embarrassment. "He’s sizing me up," she thought, and sat waiting without much hope of a favorable verdict. The atmosphere of the real estate office was like a different world from any to which Elaine had been accustomed. The maps upon the wall, the business-like click of the typewriter, the phrases which she caught as people came and went, all were calculated to make her feel how little her life had prepared her for fitting into so methodical a system of activity.

Mr. Mannering turned abruptly to his niece. "Well, Peggy," he exclaimed, with the smile which was conclusive proof that, as Peggy put it, he was not "petrified." "Do I understand that you stand sponsor for this young woman?"

"Yes, sir," returned Peggy, without troubling herself to inquire into his exact meaning.

"You’ll vouch for her being efficient, courteous, obliging, industrious, quick to learn, slow to forget, and above all a sticker."

"Yes, sir," said Peggy without blinking. It was Elaine who uttered a little protesting gasp, and looked frightened.

"Well, I’ll take your word for her. You can be on hand in the morning, I suppose," he added, looking at Elaine.

Like one in a dream Elaine heard herself concluding the arrangements for her plunge. She listened to the outlining of her duties, without any clear idea of what was said, agreed to the amount of her salary, without knowing whether it was more or less than she had hoped, and finally found herself outside with Peggy, in the dazed, uncertain mood of one who is not quite sure whether she has been dreaming or not.

"Isn’t it glorious?" Peggy’s enthusiastic comment sounded wide-awake enough, at all events. "You’re a wage-earner, Elaine. Doesn’t that sound imposing? Don’t you think Uncle John’s a dear? I’m coming down some afternoon when I haven’t anything to do, and look at all those blue-prints. There’s something awfully fascinating in the things you don’t know anything about."

Elaine reflected that in this case she was likely to find untold fascination in her new occupation. Her answers to Peggy’s cheerful chatter were rather vague. Now that she had taken the final step her courage was ebbing. Her mother’s warnings, which she had brushed aside with a sense of irritation when they were spoken, sounded in her ears with monotonous insistence. After her reckless mood of the afternoon had come the inevitable reaction of tremulous cowardice. Why had she ever done it? What had made her suppose herself qualified for such a position? How was she ever going to bear it?

If this was her mood, when sustained by the cheerful companionship of Peggy, it was worse after they had said good night. Mrs. Marshall had received the news of her daughter’s prospective advent into business life with a burst of tears, after which she had refused to partake of the evening meal and had retired to her room. Elaine, herself, had choked down her food with difficulty, and went to bed at last with the firm conviction that dreams of the night, however unpleasant, could be no worse than the nightmare of her waking hours. She was not quite clear as to whether she had already disgraced the family name by the work she had chosen, or merely was about to disgrace it, by proving her woeful inefficiency. Whichever was true, she could see nothing but blackness ahead, and as she tossed on her pillow, flushed and wakeful, she wished though vainly for the relief of tears.

*CHAPTER XVIII*

*A REMARKABLE EVENING*

A wakeful restless night is not the best of preparations for launching out in untried activities. The pale, tremulous Elaine, who presented herself at Mr. John Mannering’s office the next morning, was far less equal to the ordeal of being "sized up" than she had been the previous day. A soldier, on the eve of his first battle, may have sensations very like those of Elaine, as she seated herself at the desk and began her unfamiliar work.