Janet's College Career
[CHAPTER I]
PREPARATIONS
JANET stood at her window thoughtfully tapping her lips with her forefinger. The window looked out upon the bay, but Janet was not observant of the white sails melting into the horizon, nor of the line of misty shore opposite. She was not unperceptive; in fact she rather prided herself upon her love of the beautiful, but just now she was absorbed in a problem which was one of the many that had confronted her during the past few weeks. The day before, she had successfully settled the question of a portiere and a couch cover by suddenly remembering the two home-made spreads woven by her great-grandmother, which, in their unfaded glory of blue and red, lay for years packed away in a chest in the attic. Janet would never in the world have considered them if she had not sat behind Martha Summers the last time she went up to the city. Martha was never chary of her information, and had discoursed at length, in such tones as must be overheard, upon the beauties of an apartment just furnished by a newly-married friend of undoubted position and wealth.
"The sweetest thing you ever saw, my dear, so artistic and so unique. The dearest cozy corner, and the loveliest little library, and what do you suppose she has put up as a portiere? The quaintest old spread of her grandmother's, one of those worsted things, you know, all red and blue. She has two of them as heirlooms. Yes, really. One can't buy an heirloom, you see, and she has one between her sitting room and bedroom and another on a divan. I declare they look too sweet for anything. I am wild for some."
Having listened to all this, Janet could triumphantly drag forth the heavy spreads, and, after airing them, could have them packed away with the other belongings which were to go with her to her rooms at college.
"Even if I should rip open every pillow in the house, and take a handful of feathers out of each, it wouldn't be enough," she told herself. "Dear me, I never foresaw so many expenses." She opened a letter which she held, and scanned its contents.
"We'll simply have to have a lot of pillows for our divan, and some sort of cover, and we must have a portiere to hang between the two rooms. You can furnish those, Janet, and I will promise a chafing-dish and a samovar, a lamp, and a lot of pictures and ornaments," so the letter ran. Janet folded it with an air of finality.
"There is no use," she said. "I will simply have to do it when Ted takes all those expensive things, though, for that matter, feathers are expensive. Dear me, I'll have to bother mother again, and I told myself I wouldn't. She has all she can do to get my clothes ready. I will just put the case before her and see what she says. She is such a dear, and was so pleased about those spreads, though they were hers and not mine."
She ran from the room and went singing along the hall. "What is home without a mother?" she carolled in her clear young voice as she opened the door of the room where her mother and a seamstress were hard at work.