The Forerunner Part 117

While it matured, Mrs. Thaddler matured hers. With steady dropping she had let fall far and wide her suspicions as to the character of Union House.

"It looks pretty queer to me!" she would say, confidentially, "All those girls together, and no person to have any authority over them! Not a married woman in the house but that washerwoman,--and her husband's a fool!"

"And again; You don't see how she does it? Neither do I! The expenses must be tremendous--those girls pay next to nothing,--and all that broth and brown bread flying about town! Pretty queer doings, I think!"

"The men seem to like that caffeteria, don't they?" urged one caller, perhaps not unwilling to nestle Mrs. Thaddler, who flushed darkly as she replied. "Yes, they do. Men usually like that sort of place."

"They like good food at low prices, if that's what you mean," her visitor answered.

"That's not all I mean--by a long way," said Mrs. Thaddler. She said so much, and said it so ingeniously, that a dark rumor arose from nowhere, and grew rapidly. Several families discharged their Union House girls.

Several girls complained that they were insultingly spoken to on the street. Even the lunch patronage began to fall off.

Diantha was puzzled--a little alarmed. Her slow, steady lifting of the prejudice against her was checked. She could not put her finger on the enemy, yet felt one distinctly, and had her own suspicions. But she also had her new move well arranged by this time.

Then a maliciously insinuating story of the place came out in a San Francisco paper, and a flock of local reporters buzzed in to sample the victim. They helped themselves to the luncheon, and liked it. but that did not soften their pens. They talked with such of the girls as they could get in touch with, and wrote such versions of these talks as suited them.

They called repeatedly at Union House, but Diantha refused to see them.

Finally she was visited by the Episcopalian clergyman. He had heard her talk at the Club, was favorably impressed by the girl herself, and honestly distressed by the dark stories he now heard about Union House.

"My dear young lady," he said, "I have called to see you in your own interests. I do not, as you perhaps know, approve of your schemes. I consider them--ah--subversive of the best interests of the home! But I think you mean well, though mistakenly. Now I fear you are not aware that this-ah--ill-considered undertaking of yours, is giving rise to considerable adverse comment in the community. There is--ah--there is a great deal being said about this business of yours which I am sure you would regret if you knew it. Do you think it is wise; do you think it is--ah--right, my dear Miss Bell, to attempt to carry on a--a place of this sort, without the presence of a--of a Matron of a.s.sured standing?"

Diantha smiled rather coldly.

"May I trouble you to step into the back parlor, Dr. Aberthwaite," she said; and then;

"May I have the pleasure of presenting to you Mrs. Henderson Bell--my mother?"

"Wasn't it great!" said Mrs. Weatherstone; "I was there you see,-- I'd come to call on Mrs. Bell--she's a dear,--and in came Mrs. Thaddler--"

"Mrs. Thaddler?"

"O I know it was old Aberthwaite, but he represented Mrs. Thaddler and her clique, and had come there to preach to Diantha about propriety--I heard him,--and she brought him in and very politely introduced him to her mother!--it was rich, Isabel."

"How did Diantha manage it?" asked her friend.

"She's been trying to arrange it for ever so long. Of course her father objected--you'd know that. But there's a sister--not a bad sort, only very limited; she's taken the old man to board, as it were, and I guess the mother really set her foot down for once--said she had a right to visit her own daughter!"

"It would seem so," Mrs. p.o.r.ne agreed. "I _am_ so glad! It will be so much easier for that brave little woman now."

It was.

Diantha held her mother in her arms the night she came, and cried tike a baby.

"O mother _dear!_" she sobbed, "I'd no idea I should miss you so much.

O you blessed comfort!"

Her mother cried a bit too; she enjoyed this daughter more than either of her older children, and missed her more. A mother loves all her children, naturally; but a mother is also a person--and may, without sin, have personal preferences.

She took hold of Diantha's tangled ma.s.s of papers with the eagerness of a questing hound.

"You've got all the bills, of course," she demanded, with her anxious rising inflection.

"Every one," said the girl. "You taught me that much. What puzzles me is to make things balance. I'm making more than I thought in some lines, and less in others, and I can't make it come out straight."

"It won't, altogether, till the end of the year I dare say," said Mrs.

Bell, "but let's get clear as far as we can. In the first place we must separate your business,--see how much each one pays."

"The first one I want to establish," said her daughter, "is the girl's club. Not just this one, with me to run it. But to show that any group of twenty or thirty girls could do this thing in any city. Of course where rents and provisions were high they'd have to charge more. I want to make an average showing somehow. Now can you disentangle the girl part front the lunch part and the food part, mother dear, and make it all straight?"

Mrs. Bell could and did; it gave her absolute delight to do it. She set down the total of Diantha's expenses so far in the Service Department, as follows:

Rent of Union House . . . $1,500 Rent of furniture . . . $300 One payment on furniture . . . $400 Fuel and lights, etc. . . . $352 Service of 5 at $10 a week each . . . $2,600 Food for thirty-seven . . . $3,848 ----- Total . . . $9,000

"That covers everything but my board," said Mrs. Bell.

"Now your income is easy--35 x $4.50 equals $8,190. Take that from your $9,000 and you are $810 behind."

"Yes, I know," said Diantha, eagerly, "but if it was merely a girl's club home, the rent and fixtures would be much less. A home could be built, with thirty bedrooms--and all necessary conveniences--for $7,000.

I've asked Mr. and Mrs. p.o.r.ne about it; and the furnishing needn't cost over $2,000 if it was very plain. Ten per cent. of that is a rent of $900 you see."

"I see," said her mother. "Better say a thousand. I guess it could be done for that."

So they set down rent, $1,000.

"There have to be five paid helpers in the house," Diantha went on, "the cook, the laundress, the two maids, and the matron. She must buy and manage. She could be one of their mothers or aunts."

Mrs. Bell smiled. "Do you really imagine, Diantha, that Mrs.

O'Shaughnessy or Mrs. Yon Yonson can manage a house like this as you can?"

Diantha flushed a little. "No, mother, of course not. But I am keeping very full reports of all the work. Just the schedule of labor--the hours--the exact things done. One laundress, with machinery, can wash for thirty-five, (its only six a day you see), and the amount is regulated; about six dozen a day, and all the flat work mangled.

"In a Girl's Club alone the cook has all day off, as it were; she can do the down stairs cleaning. And the two maids have only table service and bedrooms."

"Thirty-five bedrooms?"

"Yes. But two girls together, who know how, can do a room in 8 minutes--easily. They are small and simple you see. Make the bed, shake the mats, wipe the floors and windows,--you watch them!"

"I have watched them," the mother admitted. "They are as quick as--as mill-workers!"

"Well," pursued Diantha, "they spend three hours on dishes and tables, and seven on cleaning. The bedrooms take 280 minutes; that's nearly five hours. The other two are for the bath rooms, halls, stairs, downstairs windows, and so on. That's all right. Then I'm keeping the menus--just what I furnish and what it costs. Anybody could order and manage when it was all set down for her. And you see--as you have figured it--they'd have over $500 leeway to buy the furniture if they were allowed to."

"Yes," Mrs. Bell admitted, "_if_ the rent was what you allow, and _if_ they all work all the time!"

"That's the hitch, of course. But mother; the girls who don't have steady jobs do work by the hour, and that brings in more, on the whole.

If they are the right kind they can make good. If they find anyone who don't keep her job--for good reasons--they can drop her."