“Hear her!” ejaculated Mrs. Harley. “It will be several years yet, young lady, before you will be ‘out,’ as you call it, or be allowed to spend your father’s money as lavishly as you would like to.”
Nevertheless she kissed her daughter tenderly, just before the train started, and Bess forgot for a moment that she was anything but a young girl going a long way off from a very dear and indulgent mother. They clung to each other for that tender, heart-breaking moment, and Nan Sherwood’s eyes overflowed in sympathy.
Nan had been through the same ordeal six months before, when her own dear mother and father had started for Scotland, while she left Tillbury on the very same day for her uncle Henry’s backwoods home in the heart of the Upper Michigan forest.
“Don’t cry, Bess,” she begged her chum when the train was out of the station and the “clip, clip, clip-py-ti-clip” of the wheels over the rail joints had tailed off into a staccato chatter, scarcely discernible through the steady drumming of the great trucks under the chair-car. “Don’t cry. You know, honey, your mother isn’t going to be near as far from you as my dear Momsey is from me.”
“I don’t care,” sniffed Bess. “If I can’t see her. But oh, Nan Sherwood!” she added sharply. “What kind of grammar was that you just used—‘near as far’? If Mr. Mangel, our high-school principal at Tillbury, thought you would use such language he would never have written to Dr. Beulah Prescott that he considered you entitled to a rating equal with the remainder of our class.”
“Don’t sniff and turn up your nose, Miss, at my diction,” laughed Nan. “Your nose is bound to be red if you keep on—and your eyes, too.”
“Is it? Are they?” gasped Bess.
“Is it—are they what?” demanded Nan, rather startled.
“Why, my nose and eyes red!”
“Well! talk about grammar!” ejaculated Nan. “I wouldn’t criticise, if I were you.”