Little Miss By-The-Day Part 15

"No manners at all. A manner," said the Justice neatly.

Back in the little hall room she sat dizzily on the edge of the bed and divided the last of Margot's dry sandwiches with Babiche. They were both ravenously hungry. Felicia turned the few coins out of Louisa's old purse and contemplated them. Wherever she had turned in these two busy days she had had to pay, she was perpetually asked for money.

And quite surely she must have some more. She couldn't ask Margot, and the "receiver for the estate" would give her none. She stared at the smug faced shepherdesses.

"Where," she thought, "Do persons get money?"

The shepherdesses smiled back stupidly.

Babiche answered her really. Having all there was to eat the wee dog settled herself uncomfortably on the thin pillow.

"If I knew where the Wheezy was I'd have her make you a cushion--oh!

oh! Babiche! How stupid I've been! The Wheezy got money, Mademoiselle used to give it to her from Maman's purse, two dollars every day--for sewing--why, Babiche, I can sew beautifully--much better than the Wheezy!"

It was a delightful moment, a self-reliant, decisive moment. Her eyes sparkled, she caught up the ugly bonnet, she could hardly hurry fast enough to find The Woman's Exchange and Employment Agency. She even remembered the sign in the window.

"Applications for work received Tuesdays and Fridays." She was so glad that it was Friday that she could have whistled. So down the stairs they went again, the little dog and mistress, and straight around the corner, past the old church, there they stopped for Felicia to read what she hadn't stopped to read before,

"THIS PROPERTY FOR SALE OR TO LET SUITABLE FOR GARAGE OR MOVING PICTURES APPLY YOUR OWN BROKER"

She stumbled around uncollected garbage, she waited impatiently for impudent children to move out of her way, she thrilled with rage at the sordid world about her.

"That pattern of it all is gone--I can't see how it was unless I close my eyes," she thought.

But when she came to the faded sign "WOMAN'S EXCHANGE AND EMPLOYMENT AGENCY" she smiled. For that at least was exactly as it had been save that it looked tinier and dingier than it had in the old days. She opened the iron-grilled door, her eager heart antic.i.p.ating the tinkling jangle of the spring bell at the rear, and when the shadowy curtains parted and a grizzled head, surmounted by gold-rimmed spectacles tucked above a worried forehead appeared, Felicia could have cried out with delight.

For there was the Disagreeable Walnut, limping more painfully than she had used to limp, blinking more uncertainly than she had used to blink. Her rasping voice came thinner and more peevish than it had twenty years ago but she called out just the same,

"Well, what's your business?"

Felicia listened dreamily; she seemed to be absorbing the whole shop, the dusty shelves lined with useless "fancy" work, into whose fashioning no fancy at all had crept; the cracked show counters filled with pasty china daubed with violets and cross-eyed cupids,--propped up rakishly in the very front of the dustiest, most battered case of all the fat string dolly leaned despondently and smiled her red floss smile.

"Oh, how you've lasted!" breathed Felicia.

"What?" shrilled the Disagreeable Walnut, blushing under her shriveled skin.

"I mean--the little person made of string--" murmured Felicia abashed.

"I saw her here--when we came for The Wheezy--Mademoiselle D'Ormy and I."

The Disagreeable Walnut snorted.

"Oh, that Mademoiselle D'Ormy," she squinted through her adjusted gla.s.ses, her shaking, purple-veined hands fumbling with the silk that was wound around the bows to protect her thin old temples, "She hain't been here this long while, have you seen her?"

"Do you know me?" demanded Felicia stepping very close.

"Don't know as I do--yet it seems like I did too--you hain't been here in a long while, have ye?"

"Don't you remember--I lived in that same house where Mademoiselle D'Ormy stayed--she brought me in here when I was a little girl--when we came to get the Wheezy to sew--"

The Disagreeable Walnut shook her head.

"I never knew anybody named Wheezy."

"The Wheezy was fat--" Felicia puffed out her chest, tilted her chin downward and hunched up her shoulders like the Wheezy. She cleared her throat and panted and let her breath come sighingly through her pursed lips, "She couldn't see why under the shining canopy the Major had her make c-cushions for the dogs--"

The shop keeper nodded her recognition of The Wheezy.

"Oh, you mean Sophia Pease--dear! dear!" she wiped her eye gla.s.ses tremblingly, "She's been out to the Baptist Home for the Aged this long whiles. Her eyes went back on her--a nice sewer, as nice a sewer as we ever had--dear, dear! I don't know when anybody asked me about Sophia Pease--she made them dolls you was just mentioning--" she motioned toward the disconsolate string toy--"dear, dear! she made them even after she couldn't see for regular sewing--"

"Now can't you remember me?" reiterated Felicia pleadingly.

The Disagreeable Walnut shook her head.

"Can't say as I do--"

"But I am Felice--the little girl who came with Mademoiselle D'Ormy to get Miss Pease--can't you see that I am?"

The old woman's t.i.ttering laugh of denial made Felicia want to shake her.

"That child--why you hain't she--she wouldn't be the matter of half your age--you must be thirty-five or forty, hain't ye? She grew up and run away like the rest of her women folks--" she giggled sardonically, "Was a young limb, she was, I used to hear her whistling at them choir boys next door--a young limb--all the girls in that family was man- chasers--the mother run off with the rector's son--younger'n she was-- by a good two years I should say, she must ha' been thirty if she was a minute--but pretty--prettier n' her mother--ever see the mother, Miss Trenton--Miss Montrose that was?"

"Did you?" breathed Felicia. "Oh, did you see Grandy's Louisa?"

"Did I ever see her?" the Disagreeable Walnut leaned her sharp elbows on the show case. "I see her when she was a bride--I'd just took charge here then--she was a high-stepper! The Major hadn't a penny when she married him but she had all the Montrose money and she got him--some say as she told him if he'd marry her she'd live on what he earned--but I guess he couldn't have earned the matter of her shoe strings--not the way she dressed--she was stylish and tasty in her dress--and then she eloped--with that lawyer fellow--some says she didn't elope with him, but she went off for some French property her mother had left her--but I dunno--she was an awful high-stepper. All I know is that after she was dead and the Major brought Miss Octavia home--"

"Did you see Maman? Did you?" Felicia could hardly breath, "Did you see Octavia--wasn't she sweet? Wasn't she darling--didn't you love her, love, love her?"

"Too high-stepping!" sniffed the old woman, "Whole lot of 'em was too high-stepping for me--never liked any of 'em--"

"She didn't step at all--" Felicia's anger was rising, "She just stayed in her bed and stayed in her bed--how dare you say you--oh!

oh!" Color burned in her pale cheeks, "I won't have you say such things--"

"Well, I hain't quarreling with you about them folks," said the Disagreeable Walnut sententiously, "They're all dead and buried anyhow. And pore Sophia Pease might jes' as well be--mewed up in that Baptist home where her friends, if she's got any, can't see her excepting on Sundays--my stars! I wouldn't go to live in that Home, no sir, I wouldn't--nor I wouldn't want to live at the--"

"Can you tell me," Felicia broke in upon this flood of opinions, "Where I could go to see Miss Pease?"

"I'm telling you--the Baptist Home--"

"I do think she'd know me," Felicia murmured thoughtfully. "I do think she would." She moved toward the door, intent upon trying to see Miss Pease.

But the Disagreeable Walnut, for all that she was old, was quite capable of handling her job. She called petulantly after her retreating caller.

"What was you coming in for--anything you wanted to buy?"

Felicia turned.

"How stupid I am to forget. I came because it was Friday, you know, I wanted to have some work, please. For two dollars a day and lunch."

The shop keeper pulled a dusty ledger toward her.