The Wishing-Ring Man Part 3

"I have something pleasant to tell you, dear," said Grandmother, patting the arm she still held.

"Yes, Grandmother?" she asked, smiling. An hour or so before she would have been wild to know what it was, but now she was only serenely glad that it did exist. She knew perfectly well that things had begun to happen. And now they would go on and on and on till the fairy-tale ending came. She knew that, too. Somehow, the shut-out feeling was all gone, ever since the gray-eyed man had sat at her feet in the hall and given her the wishing ring. The curtain was up--or, rather, the door was open into things, just as he'd pushed open the door from her little dark dream-place, the door that had always been there, but n.o.body'd thought to use. Of course, things were going to happen--lovely ones!

"I know I'll like it," she ended, with a happy little laugh.

"You seem better already, dear," said her grandmother happily, and began: "We have been talking about your health, and we have decided that you need a change, and some young life. So we are going up to an inn in the Maine woods for a month or more. There's boating there, and--and games, I understand, and there's a literary colony near, so there'll be people for your grandfather. He thinks he may go on holding small Afternoons. It's a cottage inn."

Joy did not know then what a cottage inn was, but neither did she care. She clasped her hands happily over the invisible wishing ring.

As Joy helped Grandmother pack, the next week, she wondered a little about clothes. She did not worry now, because she had a conviction that if she only knew what she wanted, and hoped as Jack had told her, she could hope things straight to her. There was a gray taffeta in a window uptown, together with a big gray chiffon hat, a little pair of glossy gray strapped slippers, and filmy gray silk stockings. And the hat, instead of having pink roses on it, as you'd think a normal hat would, by the mercy of Providence had deep yellow roses, exactly the color Joy knew she could wear if she got the chance. The chance, to be sure, was remote. She did not have an allowance, just money when she asked for it; and her fall wardrobe had been bought only a few weeks before. Besides the amber satin that the poetry was about, there were three other frocks, lovely, artistic, but, Joy was certain, no mortal use for tennis. She didn't know how to play tennis, but she intended to, just the same.

Now, how, with just seven dollars left from your last birthday's ten, could you buy a silk frock, with a hat and shoes and stockings to match? The answer seemed to be that you couldn't, but Joy did not want to look at it that way yet. And as she gazed around her bedroom in search of inspiration, her eyes fell on an illuminated sentiment over her bureau. It had been sent Grandfather by a Western admirer who had done it by hand herself in three colors, not counting the gilt. Grandfather had one already, so Joy had helped herself to this, because it matched the color of her room. She had never read it before, but, reading it today, it impressed her as excellent advice to the seeker after fine raiment.

"Let the farmer," Mr. Emerson had said, "give his corn, the miner a gem, the painter his picture, the poet his poem." Joy did not stop to wonder (for the Western lady had left it out) on just what principle these contributions were being made. She didn't care.

"Now, that's the way people earn money," said she practically, and tried to think what she could do.

Cook--she could make very good things to eat, but Grandmother would have to know about that, and, besides, it wouldn't be a thing they would approve of. Sewing--no, you couldn't get much out of that. She could recite poetry and be decorative, but she gave a little shiver at the thought. She played and sang as Grandmother had taught her--harp and piano--and spoke Grandmother's French. She couldn't do much with _them_.... Oh, she was just decorative! And as she prepared to be vexed at the idea, suddenly the motto caught her eye again.

"It's a perfectly impossible idea from _their_ standpoint,"

said Joy, with the light of battle in her eye for almost the first time in her life, "but I simply have to have that gray dress."

She rose and fished the amber satin out of her trunk. She put it on, put her long coat over it, packed her next most picturesque frock in a bag, fastened on a hat, and walked out the front door.

Just three blocks away lived a dear, elderly mural decorator who was always telling her how he wished he had her for a model. She knew he was making studies now for about a half-mile of walls in a new, rich statehouse somewhere far away.

She should have been frightened at this, her first adventure, but she wasn't. She found her heart getting gayer and lighter as she ran down the steps with her little bag. It was the kind of a day when all the policemen and street-sweepers and old women selling shoe-laces look at you pleasantly, and make cheerful remarks to you.

Even the conductor whose street-car she didn't take smiled pleasantly at her after stopping his car by mistake. It was as kind-hearted and pleasant-minded a worldful of people as Joy had ever met, and she was singing under her breath with happiness as she ran up the steps leading to Mr. Morrow's studio. There wasn't any particular excuse for her being so light-hearted, excepting that the street-people had been so friendly minded, and there was such a dear little breeze with a country smoke-scent on it, and that somewhere in the world was a tall man with fair hair and a kind, authoritative voice, who had said wonderful things to her--a man she would meet again some day, when she was charming and worldly and dressed in a tailor-made suit.

Mr. and Mrs. Morrow were artists both; and she found them, blouse-swathed and disheveled, doing charcoal studies in a corner of the room apiece. Mrs. Morrow kissed Joy, arching over her so that the smudges on her pinafore wouldn't be transferred. Mr. Morrow came out of his corner and shook hands with her with less care, so that his smudges did come off on her. Then they both listened to her story with the same kindness and interest every one else had shown her that morning.

"I can sit still or stand still as long as ever you want me to," Joy explained. "And you said yourself I was decorative, Mr. Morrow; you know you did!"

"I did, indeed," Mr. Morrow answered promptly, while Mrs. Morrow asked some more questions.

Joy answered them.

"And I would be able to earn enough money for all those things in the window by Friday?" she ended.

The Morrows smiled and glanced at each other. Joy did not know, till some months later, why they smiled. Then they spoke, nearly together.

"Yes, indeed, dear child--quite enough!"

Joy was rea.s.sured, because, though she didn't know model-prices, she had been afraid that it wouldn't be.

Then they gave her some purple draperies--the satins wouldn't do, after all, it appeared--and arranged her in them. And, to antic.i.p.ate, when Joy went out to that statehouse, the next year, she was able to pick out her own bronze-gold braids and purple royalties all up and down the frieze.

"By Jove, she _is_ a good model!" said Mr. Morrow after a couple of hours, pulling at his pointed gray beard and speaking enthusiastically in his soft artist-voice.

"Splendid!" said untidy, handsome Mrs. Morrow, sitting down on the model-throne to view her own work the better. "But she must be ready to drop, aren't you, Joy, dear? You aren't used to it."

But Joy shook her head.

"I'm not tired a bit," she said truthfully. "I just let go all over and stay that way. It isn't sitting any stiller than I do lots of days, when Grandfather has me stay close by him, and keep very still so he can write. Why, it seems downright sinful," she went on earnestly, "to earn beautiful gray clothes by just sitting still!

But you would have to have somebody, anyway, wouldn't you?"

"Of course we would!" said Mrs. Morrow, picking up her crayon again.

"Indeed, we have to have two most of the time."

They all kept very quiet for a while after that, Joy sitting still in her robes of state, a slim young Justice presiding over an as yet undrawn Senate, and the Morrows working hard at her. She had been posing for another half hour, when there came a whirlwind of steps up the stairs, and the door banged open.

"Mrs. Morrow, can you let me have some fixative?" called a voice; and Joy moved her eyes cautiously, and saw a pretty, panting girl in the doorway. She looked like an artist, too, for she had a smudge of paint on one vivid cheek, and her black hair was untidily down over her gipsy eyes.

"Nice model you've got--good skin tints--oh, don't bother about the fixative if you're working. I see it."

She darted in, past Joy, s.n.a.t.c.hed a bottle half full of something yellow, and was out again before any one could speak.

"I'm hurrying," she called superfluously back as she fled to the floor below. "Giving a dance tonight."

Joy, most mousy-quiet in her chair, mentally registered another requirement toward being the kind of girl she ought to be. There were such lots of wonderful things to learn!

She went to the Morrows regularly every day after that, six days in all. She told Grandmother where she was, not what she was doing. It didn't occur to her that Grandmother would mind, but she thought it would be pleasanter to surprise her, and say, "See the lovely dress I earned all myself, posing for the Morrows!"

Meanwhile, Grandmother, pleased at her little girl's brightened face and general happiness of demeanor, asked no questions.

"You've been one of the best models we ever had, my dear," said Mrs.

Morrow in her deep, unceremonious voice, when the last day came.

"And it occurred to me that you might be too hurried when the last day came to do your shopping yourself. So I just ran uptown and got your pretties for you."

It was not for a long time that Joy discovered the regular pay of a model to be fifty cents an hour, and the sum total of her gray costume to have been--it was late for summer styles, so they were marked down--fifty-three dollars and ninety cents. But Mrs. Morrow had said to Mr. Morrow, who usually saw things as she did, even before she explained them:

"Alton Havenith would never let that dear little thing have anything as modish as those clothes. He'd keep her for a living ill.u.s.tration to his poem-books till he died. And we're making a lot on that Sagawinna Courthouse thing.... And we haven't any daughter."

And Mr. Morrow, remembering a seven-year-old with blue eyes and yellow hair, who had never grown old enough to ask for French-heeled shoes and picture hats, said only, "That's what I thought, too."

Joy, blissfully ignorant that she had been given a good deal of a present, kissed them both ecstatically on receiving a long, large pasteboard box, and almost ran home. She was so eager, indeed, to get upstairs and try on her finery that she quite upset a Neo-Celtic poet who had come to see if Grandfather would write an article about him, and was standing on the doorstep on one foot in a dreamy manner. He was rather small, and so not difficult to fall over. She did not stop to see if he was injured; she merely recovered herself, grasped her precious boxes more closely and sped on upstairs, thinking how pleasant it was that she was no relation to _him_.

To have even fine poetry written about you was bad enough; it must be much worse if the poetry was bad, too.

When she opened her box she found that Mrs. Morrow had seen and bought something else for her; a golden-brown wool jersey sweater suit, with a little brown cap to match.

"Oh, how lovely! I can wear them all day, and the gray things all night--all evening, I mean," Joy exulted. "And maybe I'll never have to put on the picture dresses at all!"

She went to sleep that night with the brown suit laid out in its box across the foot of her bed, below her feet, and the gray chiffon hat, with its golden yellow roses, on a chair by her, where she could touch it if she woke in the night and thought she had dreamed it. She said her prayers almost into it; she was so obliged to the Lord for the hat and the frocks, and the man who had talked to her in the dark, that she felt as if she ought to take the hat, at least, and show it to G.o.d while she was praying.

They had been in Maine long enough for Joy to discover what a cottage inn really was. It appeared that the inn itself lived in the middle, as a sort of parent; and all around it sprang up small cottages, where you and yours could dwell, and never a.s.sociate with anybody you didn't want to, except at mealtime, or lingering about a little afterwards, or at dances. And if you were unusually exclusive (also unusually rich), they took you over your meals, and you never saw anybody at all. Joy was exceedingly glad that Grandfather was only comfortably off, because she liked, best of all the day's round, the little times before and after dinner when she could sit on the porch and watch people, and decide whom she was going to like most, and whom she was going to be most like.