“Isn’t that horrid of him?” cried Jess, unable to keep still any longer. “As though we girls talked any more than the men do. I should say not!”
But Helen agreed to let Dud govern her future course in trying to untangle the web of circumstance that had driven her father out of New York years before. As Dud said, somebody was guilty, and that somebody was the person they must find.
It encouraged Helen mightily to have someone talk this way about the matter. A solution of the problem seemed so imminent after she parted from the fledgling lawyer and his sister, that Helen determined to hasten to their conclusion certain plans she had made, before she returned to the West.
For Helen could not remain here. Her uncle’s home was not the refined household that dear dad had thought, in which she would be sheltered and aided in improving herself.
“I might as well take board at the Zoo and live in the bear’s den,” declared Helen, perhaps a little harsh in her criticism. “There are no civilizing influences in that house. I’d never get a particle of ‘culture’ there. I’d rather associate with Sing, and Jo-Rab, and the boys, and Hen Billings.”
Her experience in the great city had satisfied Helen that its life was not for her. Some things she had learned, it was true; but most of them were unpleasant things.
“I’d rather hire some lady to come out to Sunset and live with me and teach me how to act gracefully in society, and all that. There are a lot of ‘poor, but proud’ people who would be glad of the chance, I know.”
But on this day—after she had left her riding habit at a tailor’s to be brushed and pressed, and had made arrangements to make her changes there whenever she wished to ride in the morning—on this day Helen had something else to do beside thinking of her proper introduction to society. This was the first day it had been fit for her to go downtown since she and Sadie Goronsky had had their adventure with the old man whom Sadie called “Lurcher,” but whom Fenwick Grimes had called “Jones.”
Helen was deeply interested in the old man’s case, and if he could be helped in any proper way, she wanted to do it. Also, there was Sadie herself. Helen believed that the Russian girl, with her business ability and racial sharpness, could help herself and her family much more than she now was doing, if she had the right kind of a chance.
“And I am going to give her the chance,” Helen told herself, delightedly. “She has been, as unselfish and kind to me—a stranger to her and her people—as she could be. I am determined that Sadie Goronsky and her family shall always be glad that Sadie was kind to the ‘greenie’ who hunted for Uncle Starkweather’s house on Madison Street instead of Madison Avenue.”