“Mother Jess doesn’t let things slide.”
“Mother Jess has been at it a good many years, but I’ll bet she would now and then if things got too thick and she couldn’t keep both ends up. There’s more to Mother Jess’s job than what they call housekeeping.”
“Oh, yes,” sighed Elliott, “I know that. 236 But just what do you mean, Bruce, that I could do?”
He hesitated a minute. “Well, call it morale. That suggests the thing.”
Elliott thought hard for a minute after the door closed on Bruce. Perhaps, after all, seeing that the family had three meals a day and lived in a decently clean house and slept warm at night, necessary as such oversight was, wasn’t the most imperative business in hand. Somehow or other those things weren’t at all what came into her mind when she thought of Aunt Jessica—no, indeed, though Aunt Jessica made such perfectly delicious things to eat. What came into her mind was far different—like the way Aunt Jessica had sat on Elliott’s bed and kissed her, that homesick first night; Aunt Jessica’s face at meal-time, with Uncle Bob across the table and all her boys and girls filling the space between; Aunt Jessica comforting 237 Priscilla when the child had met with some mishap. Priscilla seldom cried when she hurt herself; “Mother kisses the place and makes it well.” The words linked themselves with Bruce’s in Elliott’s thought. Was that what he had meant by morale? She couldn’t have put into words what she understood just then. For a minute a door in her brain seemed to swing open and she saw straight into the heart of things. Then it clicked together and left her saying, “I guess I fell down on that part of my job, Mother Jess.”
Elliott hung up her apron and mounted the stairs. She didn’t stop with the second floor and her own little room, but kept right on to the attic. There was a door at the head of the attic stairs. Elliott pushed it open. On a broken-backed horsehair sofa Gertrude lay, face down, her nose buried in a faded pillow. In a wabbly rocker, at imminent risk of a 238 breakdown, Priscilla jerked back and forth. Gertrude’s hair was tousled and Priscilla’s face was tear-stained and swollen.
“Don’t you think,” Elliott suggested, “it is time we girls washed our faces and made ourselves pretty?”
“I left you all the dishes to do.” Gertrude’s voice was muffled by the pillow. “I—I just couldn’t help it.”
“That’s all right. They’re done now. I didn’t do them, either. Let’s go down-stairs and wash up.”
“I don’t want to be pretty,” Priscilla objected, continuing to rock. Gertrude neither moved nor spoke again.