“Oh, no, no!” Sally cried. “I—I’ll pack now, Miss Pond. And thank you a million times for telling me, even if it did hurt.”
In her distress Miss Pond trotted out of the locker-room without a thought for the bit of paper on which she had scribbled the memorandum of Sally’s pitifully meager life history. But Sally had not forgotten it. She snatched it from the floor and pinned it to her “body waist,” a vague resolution forming in her troubled heart.
When five o’clock came Sally Ford was waiting in the office for Clem Carson, her downcast eyes fixed steadily upon the small brown paper parcel in her lap, color staining her neck and cheeks and brow, for Mrs. Stone, stiffly, awkwardly but conscientiously, was doing her institutional best to arm the state’s charge for her first foray into the outside world.
“And so, Sally, I want you to remember to—to keep your body pure and your mind clean,” Mrs. Stone summed up, her strong, heavy face almost as red as Sally’s own. “You’re too young to go out with young men, but you’ll be meeting the hired hands on the farm. You—you mustn’t let them take liberties of any kind with you. We try to give you girls in the Home a sound religious and moral training, and if—if you’re led astray it will be due to the evils in your own nature and not to lack of proper Christian training. You understand me, Sally?” she added severely.
“Yes, Mrs. Stone,” Sally answered in a smothered voice.
Sally’s hunted eyes glanced wildly about for a chance of escape and lighted upon the turning knob of the door. In a moment Clem Carson was edging in, his face slightly flushed, a tell-tale odor of whisky and cloves on his breath.
“Little lady all ready to go?” he inquired with a suspiciously jovial laugh, which made Sally crouch lower in her chair. “Looking pretty as a picture, too! With two pretty girls in my house this summer, reckon I’ll have to stand guard with a shotgun to keep the boys away.”
Word had gone round that Sally Ford was leaving the Home for the summer, and as Clem Carson and his new unpaid hired girl walked together down the long cement walk to where his car was parked at the curb, nearly three hundred little girls, packed like a herd of sheep in the wire-fenced playground adjoining the front lawn, sang out goodbys and good wishes.
“Goodby Sal-lee! Hope you have a good time!”
“Goodby, Sal-lee! Write me a letter, Sal-lee!” “Goodby, goodby!”