The Turned-About Girls

by Beulah Marie Dix

Please tell Miss Penelope how sorry I am when she was so good to me and you were so good, and give my kindest regards to Sallie and Hannah.

She was crying a little now. How funny the round tears looked where they spattered on the creamy paper! She blotted the sheet hastily and slipped it into an envelope. In story books, when people left home, they always pinned their farewell notes to the pin-cushion, but that seemed to Caroline a foolish thing to do. How should Aunt Eunice see a little note on the pin-cushion, if she looked in at the door? And Aunt Eunice must see it at once, or she might be worried when there was no little girl in the house at dinner time.

After a moment’s thought Caroline softly tipped the rocker forward ignominiously upon the floor. She placed a pillow from the bed upon the rocker, and pinned her note, addressed to “Mrs. Gildersleeve,” upon the pillow. Certainly Aunt Eunice or Cousin Penelope or whoever came first into the room would be sufficiently struck with the oddity of its arrangement to look further and find the note. Then she put on her hat (Jacqueline’s hat, but the plainest she could find!) and she took Mildred under one arm, and the satin box, full of little doll-clothes, under the other arm, and softly, on tiptoe, not daring to look back, she stole out of the darling room, and closed the door upon it.

If she happened to meet Sallie, she meant to tell her she was going to look for Eleanor Trowbridge. But she didn’t meet Sallie. Unchallenged, she slipped out at the front door and across the fragrant garden, where she was never to play again. Through the gap in the hedge she reached the shortcut, and a moment later she was in Longmeadow Street, and heading south toward the road that she knew led into the Meadows.

A smart sedan came rolling toward her up the wide, shaded street. As it met her and passed by, she was aware of people who nodded to her pleasantly. That was Mrs. Francis Holden, the Judge’s daughter-in-law, and Doris and Edith Holden, her two little girls with whom Caroline had played sometimes. They were bowing and smiling to Jacqueline Gildersleeve, in a kilted pongee skirt and an orange silk slip-over. They weren’t bowing to Caroline Tait, in borrowed clothes. They would never know Caroline Tait.

For down in the Meadows, surely Caroline would be in a different school district, and as for Sunday School—she was never coming to Longmeadow again, not even for Sunday School—not even if she died a heathen! She would do anything half-aunt Martha asked her to do—why, she believed she would even milk the cows!—if only half-aunt Martha wouldn’t make her go into Longmeadow for anything. She simply couldn’t face the village and the people who had known her as Jacqueline, now that they must know her as a cheat. She would be too ashamed.

The shaded, wide street, with its picturesque old houses set in their colorful, scented gardens, opened in a little patch of sun and dust, where the treeless road to the Meadows branched off. Here Caroline turned her back on Longmeadow, and trudged heavily along the way that was marked out for her. The sun was sinking toward the western hills, but the air was hot and breathless, and the smell of the onion fields caught her by the throat and almost choked her. Now and then an automobile overtook and passed her—ramshackle cars, mostly, and in them swarthy men, who spoke a strange tongue. Once one of them called to her.

It was only friendly Mr. Zabriski, in his kindness offering a ride to a strange, white-faced child, who looked too tired to walk, but to Caroline he seemed a dangerous character. She clutched Mildred and the box of clothes, and scuttled off among the onions, and Mr. Zabriski, justly offended, grunted his indignation and clattered on.

The powdery white dust hung in a cloud above the road after he had passed. Caroline breathed it, ate it. There was dust in her hair—dust in her shoes. She wondered if she could keep on setting one foot before the other until she reached her destination. How far was it to the Conway farm in the Meadows? Jackie had walked the distance and made light of it. But Jackie was afraid of nothing.

At the first house she came to on the sparsely settled road she saw a big dog, so she did not dare to stop and ask questions. At the second house, a long way farther on, were swarthy children, who shouted at her in their strange tongue, and in terror for Mildred she almost ran past the place without stopping. By the time she reached the third house, her mouth and throat were lined with dust and she was ready to cry with weariness and despair. She would have asked any one for directions now, even a Polish farm-hand or a jeering child. But when she reached the tumble-down gray house, she found it tenantless.