When the door into the big front room was opened and the girls entered, Mrs. Curtis rose hastily to welcome Ruth and Helen warmly. The women were, for the most part, busily sewing. But, of course, that puts no brake upon the activities of the tongue. Indeed, the needle seems to be particularly helpful as an accompaniment to a “dish of gossip.”
“I still think it is terrible,” one woman was saying quite earnestly to another, who was one of the few idle women in the room, “if an organization like that cannot be trusted.”
The idle woman was dressed plainly but elegantly in black, with just a touch of white at wrists and throat. She was a graceful woman, tall, not yet forty, and with a set smile on her face that might have been the outward sign of a sweet temperament, and then——
“Mrs. Mantel!” whispered Helen to Ruth. “I do not like her one bit. And nobody knows where she came from or who she is. Cheslow has only been her abiding place since we went to college last autumn.”
“Sh!” whispered Ruth in return. “I am interested.”
“Oh, I assure you, my dear Mrs. Crothers, that it may not be the organization’s fault,” purred the woman in black. “The objects of the Red Cross are very worthy. None more so. But in certain places—locally, you know—of course I don’t mean here in Cheslow——
“Yet I could tell you of something that happened to me to-day. I was quite hurt—quite shocked, indeed. I saw on the street a sweater that I knitted myself last winter.”
“Oh! On a soldier?” asked another of the women who heard. “How nice!”
“No, indeed. No soldier,” said Mrs. Mantel quickly. “On a girl. Fancy! On a girl I had never seen before. And I gave that to the Red Cross with my own hands.”
“Perhaps it belonged to the girl’s brother,” another of the women observed.