“I should hope so,” Jeannette approved warmly.
“Etta’s delighted with her dress,” Alice said with an abruptness that suggested a desire to change the subject. “You were a dear to help her out.”
“It was nothing at all,—less than five dollars. It seemed a shame not to get something that was becoming, and there’s real value in that garment.”
“Oh, yes, indeed. I could see that.”
Great thumping, banging and scraping were going on somewhere down below.
“Roy and Ralph are cleaning the furnace,” explained Alice in answer to her sister’s puzzled look. “It hasn’t been fired,—oh, I don’t think since last March.... Come upstairs and lay your things on Etta’s bed. I’ve got Nettie in mine; it’s so much pleasanter in our room.”
The two women mounted the creaking stairs. In the front room a little girl was propped up in bed with several pillows; she was cutting out pictures from magazines and the bed clothes and carpet were littered with scraps and slips of paper; a thin, plaid shawl was about her shoulders, fastened clumsily across her chest with a large safety-pin. She was not a particularly pretty child; her face was too long and too pale, but her hair, soft and rippling, had the warm brown color that had distinguished her mother’s, and her eyes were of the same hue.
“Look, Moth’, I put a new hat on this lady and she looks a lot nicer.” The child held up a wavering silhouette for inspection. “Oh, hello, Aunt Janny,” she cried as her aunt appeared in her mother’s wake; “was that you in the taxi?”
There was a note of real pleasure, Jeannette felt, in the little girl’s greeting, and she put some feeling into her kiss as she bent down to embrace her.
“I brought you some lemon drops, Nettie, but since you’re upset perhaps you’d better not have them.”