"Yes'm—yes, Miss Wardell," stammered Jeanne, coloring as a vision of the Duval shack presented itself.
"Didn't you sleep on a mattress?"
Jeanne hung her head. She had guessed that that thick thing on her bed was a mattress, but how was she to confess that hay in a wooden bunk had been her bed! Fortunately, Jeanne did not look like a child who had slept on hay. She was small and daintily built. Her hands and feet were beautifully shaped. Her dark eyes were soft and very lovely, her little face decidedly bright and attractive. She suffered now for affection, for companionship, for the freedom of outdoor life; but never for food or for suitable garments. It is to be feared that Mrs. Huntington, during all the time that she looked after Jeannette, put clothes before any other consideration. The child was always properly clad.
Unfortunately, in spite of all Jeanne's precautions, her cousins succeeded in dragging from her all the details of her former poverty. They never got her alone that they didn't trap her into telling things that she had meant not to tell. At those times, even Harold seemed almost kind to her.
Mean children, they were pumping her, of course, but for a long time honest Jeanne did not suspect them of any such meanness. After they had learned all that there was to know, Jeanne's eyes were opened, and things were different. Sometimes Harold, in order to embarrass her, told his boy friends a weird tale about her.
"That's our cousin, the Cinder Pond Savage," Harold would say. "Her only home was a drygoods box on the end of a tumble-down dock. She sold fish for a living and ate all that were left over. She never ate anything but fish. She had nineteen stepsisters with red hair, and a cruel stepmother, who was a witch. She wore a potato sack for a dress and never saw a shoe in her life until last month. When captured, she was fourteen miles out in the lake chasing a whale. Step right this way, ladies and gentlemen, to see the Cinder Pond Savage."
Harold's friends seemed to consider this amusing; but Jeanne found it most embarrassing. The strange boys always eyed her as if she really were some little wild thing in a trap. She didn't like it.
Clara put it differently. "My cousin, Jeanette Huntington Duval, has always lived on my uncle's estate in the country. She didn't go to school, but had lessons from a tutor."
But, however they put it, Jeannette realized that she was considered a disgrace to the family, a relative of whom they were all secretly ashamed. And her father, her good, wonderful father, was considered a common, low-down Frenchman, who had married her very young mother solely because she was the daughter of a wealthy man.
"I don't believe it," said Jeanne, when Clara told her this. "My father never cared for money. That's why he's poor. And he's much easier to be friends with than your father—and he reads a great many more books than Uncle Charles does, so I know he isn't ignorant, even if you do think he is. Besides, he writes beautiful letters, with semicolons in them! Did your father write to you that time he was gone all summer?"