"Were you compelled to live alone?" Helen did not want to seem over curious. She had visions of some queer old aunt who had shut her doors to everybody.
"Yes. I'd like to tell you some things I could not tell Mrs. Aldred; at least, my guardian's wife advised me not to be too frank about my life, since it probably would not interest anybody, or if it did they would pretend to admire me and care for the money's sake and what they could get out of me. Grandfather always said so. I don't know as he meant me to have it all, but he left no will, and as there was no one else it had to come to me."
"I'd like to hear about it if you did not mind. And—if you would like to be friends——"
"Oh, you don't know how dreary it is to be so much alone. Mrs. Davis thought the school such a foolish plan. But I was so ignorant. I didn't feel that I could go into society without knowing something. And I have learned a good deal by watching the girls. Many of them have such lovely manners. But if I had just one friend to talk things over with——"
There was such a longing in her tone that it seemed fairly to sweep through Helen.
"I don't know whether I should be a very judicious friend." Oh, if Mrs. Van Dorn could only set this girl straight, she thought, for that lady's wisdom had come to be nearly the whole book of the world for Helen. "But if you liked to try me. I should be true, I can answer for that," and the trustiness rang in her voice.
"I've really had no one but Mrs. Davis, and I haven't been drawn to her, although she has been very kind. Yet she is so different from Mrs. Aldred, and I can't tell which is nearer right. Only I do enjoy it better here. It is more like the harmony in music. Then I am confused in a big city, and I really couldn't go into society."
"How did you come to live so much alone?" inquired Helen, feeling as if she was unraveling a story.
"Father died when Arthur and I were very little, and mother went home to his father's. It's a queer, curious place with great mountainous ridges on one side, and on the other, to the south, stretches of land, good for nothing much, being iron fields, a sort of dreary waste, not considered good enough in ore to be worked much. Grandfather had bought it twenty or thirty years before in a great speculating time, then it had dropped down. I suppose the misfortunes soured him. He had a small farm beside, kept a cow, and an old nag, and pigs and chickens. Mother was his daughter-in-law. The house up in the mountainside was old and forlorn, but as grandfather said, 'It didn't leak and it couldn't blow over.' The little town was more than a mile away. I used to go in to school when the weather wasn't too bad. Arthur died soon after we went there. He was older than I. Grandfather had not really cared for me, he was queer and morose, and that disappointed him. Girls were of very little account except to keep house and mend old clothes. I did love school and study.
"When I was about thirteen there was a very hard winter, and mother took a cold. I suppose it was consumption. She just grew weaker and thinner, and really didn't give up until a few weeks before she died. She was a good deal troubled about me. I've seen that plainer since than I did then. And she kept saying, 'If any good ever comes to you, any money or any time, get an education. And don't marry any man until you have acquired that.'