This is four more days. I have been to church. I stood up and sat down like the others. I liked the feathers on the ladies' hats and the little boys in nightgowns that marched around and sang. Next Sunday I am to go to Sunday School. Mrs. Huntington says I am a Heathen.
I got a chance to touch her. Her back is hard. Now I will say good-by. But I like to write to you; so I hate to send it away but I will begin another letter right now. Maggie will put this in the letter box for me. I like Maggie but I am afraid I will tell her about my past life. Mrs. Huntington says I must never mention bare feet or fish.
Yours truly,
JEANNETTE HUNTINGTON DUVAL.
P.S.—Mrs. Huntington told a lady I was that, but you know I am just your Jeanne. I love you better than anybody.
Jeanne, you will notice, made no complaints against her rude young cousins and passed lightly over matters that had tried her rather sorely. From her letters, her father gathered that she was much happier than she really was. Perhaps nobody ever enjoyed a letter more than Mr. Duval enjoyed that first one. He went to the post office to get it because no letter-carrier could be expected to deliver mail to a tumble-down shack on the end of a long, far-away dock. He read it in the post office. He read it again in Old Captain's freight car, and when Barney Turcott came in, he too had to hear it.
Then Mollie read it. And as she read, her face was quite beautiful with the "mother-look" that Jeanne liked—it was the only attractive thing about Mollie. Then the children awoke and sat up in their bunks to hear it read aloud. Poor children! they could not understand what had become of their beloved Jeanne.
Afterwards, Mr. Duval laid the letter away in his shabby trunk, beside the little green bottle that still held a shriveled pink rose, the late wild rose that Jeanne had left on his table that last day. He had found what remained of it, on his return from his journey. It was certainly very lonely in that little room evenings, without those lessons.
Jeannette Huntington Duval found school decidedly trying at first. The pupils would pry into her past. Their questions were most embarrassing. Even the teachers, puzzled by many contradictory facts, asked questions that Jeanne could not answer without mentioning poverty or fish.
Yes, she had lived in the country (is on a dock "in the country"? wondered truthful Jeanne). No, she truly didn't know what a theater was; and she had never had a birthday party nor been to one. What did keeping one's birthday mean? Jeanne had asked. How could one give her birthday away! Of course she knew all the capitals of South America. Mountains and rivers, too. She could draw maps showing them all—she loved to draw maps. But asparagus—what was that? And velvet? And vanilla? And plumber?
"Really," said Miss Wardell, one day, after a lesson in definitions, "you can't be as ignorant as you seem. You must know the meaning of such words as jardinière, tapestry, doily, mattress, counterpane, banister, newel-post, brocade. Didn't you live in a house?"