“Oh, nasturtiums!” Eloise crowed, the first happy sound she had made since entering the orphanage.
She broke from Sally’s grasp, sped down the cement walk, then plunged into the lush greenness of that vast velvet carpet, entirely unconscious that she was committing one of the major crimes of the institution. Sally, after a stunned moment, sped after her, calling out breathlessly:
“Don’t dast to touch the flowers, Eloise! We ain’t allowed to touch the flowers! They’d skin us alive!”
But Eloise had already broken the stem of a flaming orange and red nasturtium and was cuddling it against her cheek.
“Put it back, honey,” Sally begged, herself committing the unpardonable sin of walking on the grass. “There isn’t any place at all you could hide it, and if you carried it in your hand you’d get a licking sure. But don’t you cry, Eloise. Sally’ll tell you a fairy story in play hour this afternoon.”
The two, Sally’s heart already swelling with the sweet pain of having found a new child to mother, Eloise’s tear-reddened eyes sparkling with anticipation, were hurrying up the path that led around the main building to the weaving rooms in which Sally was to work an extra hour as punishment for her morning’s “play-acting,” when Clara Hodges came shrieking from behind the building:
“Sal-lee! Sal-lee Ford! Mrs. Stone wants you. In the office!” she added, her voice dropping slightly on a note of horror.
“What for?” Sally pretended grown up unconcern, but her face, which had been pretty and glowing a moment before, was dull and institutional and sullen again.
“They’s a man—a farmer man—talking to Stone-Face,” Clara whispered, her eyes furtive and mean as they darted about to see if she were overheard. “Oh, Sal-lee, don’t let ’em ’dopt you! We wouldn’t have nobody to play-act for us and tell us stories! Please, Sal-lee! Make faces at him when Stone-Face ain’t lookin’ so’s he won’t like you!”
“I’m too big to be adopted,” Sally reassured her. “Nobody wants to adopt a 16-year-old girl. Here, you take Eloise to the weaving room with you.”