“I will—I won’t,” Jacqueline made two promises almost in one breath.
In her worn sneakers (Caroline’s sneakers!) she flashed away into the big, tidy kitchen. Corn-meal in the big tin, eggs and butter from the cool cellar. Milk in the blue and white pitcher. Sugar in the brown crock. She was going to cook! At school, in cooking class, in a neat ruffled apron, with aluminum and white-enamel bowls, and spoons of approved pattern, she had made apricot-whip and fudge. But now in the Conway kitchen, with a yellow mixing bowl and an iron spoon, she really made something that her family would like to eat, and she sang joyously as she measured and stirred.
She had two big pans of Johnny-cake in the oven that she had craftily heated, and she wasn’t looking at them more than twice every five minutes, when the family began to gather. First came Nellie, leading Freddie, and asking if supper wasn’t most ready, and Jacqueline, quite as if she ran the house, so important she now felt, told Nellie to wash her hands and Freddie’s, too, before she thought of supper. Then came Grandma, to take up Annie and freshen her against mealtime, and then the family Ford came gallantly into the yard, and here were Aunt Martha and Neil, back from Baring Junction, with three sacks of grain.
“Oh, Aunt Martha!” Jacqueline bounded to meet her. “Supper’s ready, and I made the Johnny-cake all alone, and fixed the oven by myself.”
And do you know, Caroline with her party in prospect, felt no happier than Jacqueline felt, when tired, dusty Aunt Martha (who wasn’t her aunt!) smiled at her and said:
“Well, of all things! You got the supper yourself? You spelled Grandma? I guess my bones were all right, Jackie, when they said you were the sort that would be a real little helper in the house.”
CHAPTER XIX
THE PRICE OF TEMPER
But all the days at the Conway farm were not like the day that ended in a blaze of glory, with praises and hot Johnny-cake. No more than a week later there came a day when everything went crooked.
Perhaps Jacqueline got out of bed on the wrong foot. Perhaps she was thinking too much of a pile of story papers, which she had unearthed in the shed chamber, and too little of her work. Perhaps it was simply that she had grown tired of the rôle of Caroline—even of a virtuous Caroline, who was a help and comfort in the house, and bossed the younger children.
At any rate Jacqueline dawdled and shuffled through her work, and complained constantly of the heat. It was a hot day, true enough, but as Grandma said, talking about the weather only made a bad matter ten times worse. Let it alone, and likely it would let you alone!