“I—I didn’t even speak to him,” Sally hastened to reassure Pearl, then hated herself for her humbleness.
“Here’s your room. It’s small, and it gets pretty hot in here in the summer, but I guess it’s better’n you’re used to, at that,” Pearl Carson, a little mollified, swung open a flimsy pine door.
Sally looked about her timidly, her eyes taking in the low, sagging cot bed, the upturned pine box that served as washstand, the broken rocking chair, the rusty nails intended to take the place of a clothes closet; the faded, dirty rag rug on the warped boards of the floor; the tiny window, whose single sash swung inward and was fastened by a hook on the wall.
“I’ll bring you some of my old dresses,” Pearl told her. “But you’d better hurry and change into your orphanage dress, so’s you can help Mama with the supper. She’s been putting up raspberries all day and she’s dead tired. I guess Papa told you you’d have to hustle this summer. This ain’t a summer vacation—for you. It is for me. I go to school in the city in the winter. I’m second year high, and I’m only sixteen,” she added proudly. “What are you?”
Sally, who had been nervously untying her brown paper parcel, bent her head lower so that she should not see the flare of hate in those pale blue eyes which she knew would follow upon her own answer. “I’m—I’m third year high.” She did not have the courage to explain that she had just finished her third year, that she would graduate from the orphanage’s high school next year.
“Third year?” Pearl was incredulous. “Oh, of course, the orphanage school! My school is at least two years higher than yours. We prepare for college.”
Sally nodded; what use to say that the orphanage school was a regular public school, too, that it also prepared for college? And that Sally herself had dreamed of working her way through college, even as David Nash was doing?
Eight o’clock was the supper hour on the farm in the summertime, when every hour of daylight had to be spent in the orchards and fields. When the long dining table, covered with red-and-brown-checked oilcloth, was finally set, down to the last iron-handled knife, Sally was faint with hunger, for supper was at six at the orphanage.
Sally had peeled a huge dishpan of potatoes, had shredded a giant head of pale green cabbage for coleslaw, had watched the pots of cooking string beans, turnips and carrots; had rolled in flour and then fried great slabs of round steak—all under the critical eye of Mrs. Carson, who had found herself free to pick over the day’s harvest of blackberries for canning.
“I suppose we’ll have to let Sally eat at the table with us,” Pearl grumbled to her mother, heedless of the fact that Sally overheard. “In the city a family wouldn’t dream of sitting down to table with the servants. I’m sick of living on a farm and treating the hired help like members of the family.”