“What’s broken? Let me look, sweet pettie,” coaxed Mrs. Wheeler Trowbridge.
“She said they were nice beads,” Eleanor declared her wrongs, “but they aren’t a bit nice. They’re horrid old ten-cent brass beads, and the clasp is broken.”
Mrs. Wheeler Trowbridge took Jacqueline’s string of beads from Eleanor’s grubby hands.
“Why, honey-bird,” she said, “these beads can’t be brass, with a clasp like this. They’re beautiful gold beads. Where did you get them?”
“It was the little girl from down in the Meadows,” said Eleanor, delighted to find that all the ladies were listening to her, at last. “She was over at The Chimnies. She’s always hanging round there, looking for Jacqueline, and she said the beads were worth ten dollars, but she’d let me have ’em for five, and I gave her my five dollars that Grandpa gave me, and she ran right off, and now I want my money back.”
She began to sniffle again. But she had lost the center of the stage. The ladies, in their crisp summer silks and organdies, were chattering all at once like magpies, and it was not about Eleanor that they chattered.
“One of those shabby Meadows children, with gold beads to dispose of?” cried Mrs. Judge Holden. “Well, I never!”
“They are really good beads,” said Mrs. Enos Trowbridge’s Boston cousin, with the air of one who knew beads intimately.
“Where could the child have got them?” asked Mrs. Wheeler Trowbridge.
“And she wanted to get rid of them in a hurry,” darkly hinted Miss Selina Fanning, who was a great reader of detective stories.