Jewel Weed Part 10

"Do you expect me to wear a felt hat all summer?" Lena asked sharply.

"I'm ashamed to be seen in that old thing and I should think you'd be ashamed to be so stingy with me."

Her mother sighed and lapsed into the creaking comfort of her rocking-chair.

"I ain't stingy," she said at last. "But if you had your way you'd spend every last cent of the pension the very day it comes. I've got to look out we don't starve. If you'd only make up your mind to work and earn a little instead of livin' so pinched! I'm sure I'd work if I could. But there! there ain't nothing for me to do but to set and suffer, and n.o.body knows what I endure."

"I wasn't born to be a working girl," said Lena sullenly. "I've got the blood of a lady if I haven't got the clothes of one."

"Well, when it comes to eating and drinking, blood don't count much.

Everybody's got the same appet.i.te."

"No, everybody hasn't," retorted the girl. "I haven't any appet.i.te for canned baked-beans and liver."

"You eat them, anyway."

"I know it, worse luck!"

There was a tingling silence for a moment and then Lena spoke with sudden energy.

"Mother, what can I do? I'm not one of those girls who can go ahead and don't care. I haven't been brought up as they have. The only thing you've taught me is that my father was a gentleman and that I am a beauty. And what good does that do me?"

"Teachin' is respectable."

"I can't teach. I couldn't pa.s.s a teacher's examination to save my life.

I don't know how to do anything. And I won't sink below the level of decent society. I'd starve first. Do you suppose I haven't thought it all over a hundred times?"

"You can sew very nicely. I'm sure everything you make has real style."

"Go into a shop at starvation wages to make pretty things for other girls to wear? I stopped along near Madame Cerise's to-day and looked at some of the girls near the window, with their hair all lanky and their faces sunk in, working for dear life on finery. Mother, is that what you want for me?"

There was hungry appeal in Lena's voice, that some mothers would have felt; but Mrs. Quincy was not on the lookout for other people's shades of emotion.

"Well, if you'd any sense you'd take Joe Nolan, as I've told you fifty times if I've told you once. He's got real good wages, and you could twist him around your little finger."

Lena's teeth came together with a click.

"Joe! Well, perhaps, when there's nothing else left but the poorhouse.

It's pretty tough if I have to marry a mechanic."

"Joe's a good deal of a man. He won't always be a mechanic, Lena. He's got too much ambition."

"He may, or he may not. Anyway, he'll bear the marks of a mechanic all his days. I'm not his kind."

Lena rose and went across the room to lean on the little dressing-table and survey herself in the old green gla.s.s. This was her panacea for every woe. The little pucker in her forehead straightened itself out.

"Look at me, mother," she demanded, turning around. "Do you think all this is meant to scrub and sew and cook for the foreman in locomotive works? Because I don't."

She was smiling, but her mother did not smile in return.

"I believe I was most as pretty as you are when I was a girl," Mrs.

Quincy said. "And that was all the good it did. I thought I was making a grand marriage when I got your father; but he seemed to sort of flatten out and lose all his ambition after we was married. He didn't seem to care about anything, though I used to give him my opinion pretty plain.

And it's mighty little he left me when he was took," she added vindictively.

Her daughter eyed her speculatively.

"Well, I'm not going to be taken in the way you were," she said sharply.

"You thought a good old name and a promising career were enough; and father didn't keep his promises. I want money and not the promise of money."

"And where will you find him?" sniffed Mrs. Quincy, to whom "it" and "he" were synonymous. "I don't notice any millionaires crowding up to you, for all your big eyes and your great opinion of yourself."

"That's just it. If I could only meet them!" Lena got up and walked restlessly about the room. Her eyes fell on the last night's copy of the _Star_, opened to that chatty column headed "Woman's Fancies". She had read it with absorbed interest. Her body halted now, for the muscles often stop work when the mind becomes possessed of a great idea. She stood for a long time and looked from the unwashed window-pane while a new resolve slowly hardened itself within.

"I'll try, I'll try, I'll try," she said to herself, and her heart thumped uncomfortably. "And if I take it to the office myself, when they see me perhaps they--"

Aloud she said nothing, for she had early learned the great lesson that the best way of getting her own will with her mother was to do what she wished first and argue about it afterward.

"What have we got for supper, mother?" she asked.

"Nothing," said Mrs. Quincy sharply.

"Nothing? Well, give me some money and let me go and get something."

Mrs. Quincy reluctantly lifted her skirt and began to explore her petticoat below. She shook open the mouth of a pocket into which she dived to return with a knotted handkerchief. Lena looked on impatiently as the knot was slowly untied and a small h.o.a.rd of silver disclosed.

"There," said Mrs. Quincy. "You can take this quarter, Lena, and do get something nouris.h.i.+ng. Don't buy cream-cakes. I feel the need of what will stay my stomach."

"I'll get baked-beans," answered the girl with a short laugh.

"Yes, do. I shan't have another cent till next pay-day comes. We've got to make this last. Get some tea, Lena--green, remember. The beans won't cost more than twelve cents. I don't see how you can have a new hat."

"Well, give me ten cents, anyway," Lena answered with unexpected submission.

"What do you want it for?"

"Please, mammy," Lena said coaxingly. "I won't buy cream-cakes or anything to eat. I want to invest in a gold mine."

Mrs. Quincy gave her a sharp look and grudgingly handed out a dime; for Lena's voice was instinct with hope, and hope was such a rare visitor in the dingy little lodgings that Mrs. Quincy grew generous under its magnetic warmth.

"Now what'd you want that ten cents for?" she asked curiously when the girl came back. "My land! Only paper and pencil? I thought you was going to do something grand."

CHAPTER VII

LENA'S PROGRESS

About a month after Lena had made her investment in the raw materials of the writer's art, d.i.c.k Percival happened to drop into the sooty and untidy office where for more than a year Norris had been engaged in manufacturing public opinion.