Mary Rose of Mifflin Part 9

With Jenny Lind's cage in her hand, Mary Rose knocked at Miss Thorley's door.

"We've come to have our pictures taken," she told Miss Carter, when she opened it. "The princess, I mean the other lady," she colored pinkly as Miss Carter laughed, "said we were to advertise Mr. Bingham Henderson's jam." Mary Rose always made a careful explanation. "If she would like two birds I'm almost sure that Mrs. Schuneman would loan her Germania."

"Do you want two birds, Bess?" called Miss Carter, and Miss Thorley came in.

She wore a faded blue smock over her crash gown and looked more beautiful than before to Mary Rose's admiring eyes.

"I think I have two birds," she laughed, and patted Mary Rose's head and snapped her fingers at Jenny Lind. "But don't tell me old Lady Grouch is so human as to have a canary."

"Old Lady Grouch?" Mary Rose did not know whom she meant.

"Schuneman, is that her name?" absently. Miss Thorley was studying Mary Rose from behind half shut eyes. Just how should she pose her?

"Oh, but she isn't grouchy!" Mary Rose flew to the defense of her new friend. "She was just lonesome. Now that she has Germania for company, she is very, very pleasant. I go to see her every day."

Miss Thorley shrugged her shoulders. "Every one to their taste. Stand here, Mary Rose, so that the sun will fall on that yellow mop of yours.

Would your heart break if I took off that hair ribbon? I'd rather your hair was loose."

"Aunt Kate put it there," doubtfully.

"I'll put it back before Aunt Kate sees you. Now, just hold Jenny Lind's cage under one arm and these under the other." She handed her a couple of blue and white jars, labeled with big letters--"Henderson-Bingham.

Jam Manufacturers." "Can you hold another? Don't say yes if you can't, for it is tiresome to pose when you're not used to it. Now then, how is that, Blanche? Isn't she ducky? You know it's moving day, Mary Rose, and you won't trust anyone but yourself to move what you like best, your bird and your jam."

"I just did move," proudly, "from Mifflin to Waloo."

"Exactly. Quaint, isn't she?" Miss Thorley murmured to Miss Carter.

"How old are you, Mary Rose?"

Before Mary Rose could stammer that she was going on fourteen Miss Carter broke in to say that she was off.

"Be good to Mary Rose," she begged. "And, Mary Rose, when you are tired, say so. Miss Thorley will forget all about you when she is interested in the picture and she'll let you stand there until you drop. I know. You have a hard pose with your arms like that and when you are tired be sure and say so."

"Oh, run along, Blanche, and leave us alone," Miss Thorley said impatiently as she got her drawing board and brushes and sat down beside the little table that held her paints.

Miss Carter only waited to make a face at Mary Rose before she shut the door and left the artist and her model together. Neither spoke for a few moments. Mary Rose was too interested in watching Miss Thorley's wonderful fingers and Miss Thorley was too intent on her work for conversation. At last Mary Rose could keep still no longer.

"Are you really an enchanted princess?" she asked eagerly.

"I should scarcely call myself that, Mary Rose. A working woman is the way I say it."

"Then what did Mr. Jerry mean? Don't you think he is an awfully nice man? He makes me think of Alvin Lewis in Mifflin, only Alvin isn't quite so stylish. He is a clerk in the drug store in Mifflin and he was real pleasant. When Gladys and I only had a nickel he'd let us have a gla.s.s of ice cream soda with two spoons. He was such a pleasant man. But what did Mr. Jerry mean," she returned to her mutton with a suddenness that made Miss Thorley blur a line, "when he said you were under the spell of the wicked witch Independence?"

"How should I know?" And Miss Thorley frowned in a way that made Mary Rose wish she wouldn't. It quite spoiled her face to frown with it.

"What is Independence?" Mary Rose frowned, too. As Aunt Kate had said, frowns were contagious. Mary Rose had caught one now in a flash.

Miss Thorley took up a handful of brushes and regarded them intently before she said slowly: "Independence is the greatest thing in the world, Mary Rose. It means that I can live as I choose, where I choose, that I can pay my own bills, buy my own clothes and food, that I can do exactly as I please and as I think best. The independence of women is the most wonderful thing in this wonderful age."

Mary Rose looked puzzled. Mr. Jerry had not spoken of it as if it were such a wonderful thing. She looked around the pretty room with its simple furnishings and then at Miss Thorley.

"Does it mean you aren't ever going to be married?" she asked doubtfully.

In Mifflin all the girls as big as Miss Thorley meant to be married.

"It means exactly that." Miss Thorley's pretty lips were pressed closer together. "Work, Mary Rose, is the most important thing in life."

But Mary Rose was horrified. "Aren't you ever going to make a home for a family?" she cried. She couldn't believe that was what Miss Thorley meant and she dropped a jam jar. "You don't have to stop work to do it,"

she cried eagerly and helpfully after she had retrieved the jar. "Mrs.

Evans, she's Gladys' mother, says she'd think the millennium was here if she didn't have any work to do. She has five children at home and three in the cemetery." Miss Thorley shuddered. "She can cook and sew and sweep and play the piano and she belongs to the Woman's Club and the Missionary Society and the Revolution Daughters and the Presbyterian Church. You don't ever have to stop working to make a home for a family," she repeated with a nod of encouragement to Miss Thorley who looked disgusted instead of pleased as Mary Rose had expected she would look.

"That isn't the kind of work I care for," and she shrugged her shoulders.

"I should think your Mrs. Evans would die."

"She hasn't time to die," Mary Rose told her seriously. "She's too busy taking care of Mr. Evans and her family and helping other people. She's a fine woman, everyone said in Mifflin. When I grow up I want to be just like her," emphatically.

"Oh, Mary Rose! You want to be something besides a drudge. Women have other things to do now but cook and sew and look after crying babies."

"Babies don't cry unless there's a pin sticking into them or they have the colic, and, anyway, I think babies are the dearest things G.o.d ever made. I'd like to have twelve when I grow up, six boys and six girls. I don't ever want an only child. It's too lonesome. Don't you ever get lonesome, Miss Thorley?"

"I have my work," Miss Thorley told her briefly.

Mary Rose watched her at her work. She admired Miss Thorley's swift, sure strokes, but she drew a sigh that came from the tips of her shabby shoes as she murmured: "All the same I don't understand just what Mr.

Jerry meant."

Miss Thorley did not answer, unless a frown could be considered an answer. She painted for perhaps five minutes longer, but her strokes were not so swift nor so sure. At last she threw down her brushes as if she hated herself for doing it, but realized she could do nothing else.

"Mary Rose," she said crossly. Even Mary Rose could see that she was not pleased with something. "I don't feel like painting today. It's too warm or something. If I could find a little girl about," she looked critically at Mary Rose, "about ten years old, I think I'd ask her to go out to the lake with me."

"Oh!" Mary Rose forgot that she was posing and dropped both jam jars.

She almost dropped Jenny Lind, too. She remembered Aunt Kate's request as she clung to the cage. "Would one going on fourteen be too old?" Her voice trembled and her heart beat fast for fear Miss Thorley would say that was far too old. "If she should be a long, long time, perhaps three years, before she got to fourteen?"

Miss Thorley's face was as sober as a judge's as she considered this.

"Well," she said at last very slowly, "one going on fourteen might do.

Run and ask your aunt and I'll meet you downstairs."

Mary Rose obeyed after she had hugged Miss Thorley. "You're an angel,"

she exclaimed fervently, "a regular seraphim and cherubim angel, if you are independent."

She almost fell down the stairs and made such a racket that a door on the second floor opened promptly. Mary Rose caught her breath. She was afraid to see whose door was ajar. If that cross Mr. Wells should catch her she was afraid to think what he might do. But it was not Mr. Wells'

door that had opened, nor Mr. Wells' face that looked at her. An elderly woman stood staring at her impatiently.

"Dearie me!" she was saying, "I thought the house was falling down."

"No, ma'am." Mary Rose was very apologetic. "I just stumbled a teeny bit. You see I'm in such a hurry because Miss Thorley's going to take me to the lake and I must carry Jenny Lind downstairs and tell Aunt Kate and be at the front door in a jiffy." She would have darted on but the elderly lady put out a wrinkled hand and caught Mary Rose's blue and white checked ap.r.o.n.

"Who's Jenny Lind?" she demanded.

"This is Jenny Lind." Mary Rose held up the cage. "The best bird that ever had feathers. She came with me from Mifflin and Miss Thorley's painting our picture for Mr. Henderson Bingham."