“Can’t you find it?” breathed Phœbe.
“Well!—Thought I had it. Mm! Sorry. Must’ve laid it down somewhere.”
He did not find the letter. But Phœbe was comforted by knowing it had come. Mother was West, in a city built high above the sea. There she would improve—speedily. So the best thing to do was to wait patiently. And while she waited—go to school!
The school was Miss Simpson’s. It was not a school, really, as Phœbe discovered the first day. It was a house—a house very like Grandma’s.
Of course there were differences. At Miss Simpson’s, for instance, the cellar held a great iron monster-thing with which Phœbe felt on friendly terms. This monster was the boiler, which sent steam-heat to all the various rooms.
There was no boiler in Grandma’s cellar, which was broad and high, brick-floored, and walled with cobble-stones. It contained, of course, a coal-bin. And there were other bins that Miss Simpson’s cellar could not boast—bins for potatoes, and turnips. And Miss Simpson had no shelves full of pickles and preserves, and shining cans of lard, no beams from which hung corn and onions and peppers, and hams in their sacking, and smoked bacon in a wrapping of paraffine-paper. She had no pumpkins piled yellowly in one corner, with green cabbages close beside. And where were her pork barrels ranged in a row, topped by tubs holding the eggs that had been “put down,” and the winter supply of butter?
But Miss Simpson’s cellar was much nicer than Grandma’s. For it was just like a New York basement!
Elsewhere, too, Phœbe felt the school to be infinitely more attractive than the Blair home. It was new, it was (Miss Simpson herself said it) modern, and it was built all of brick. Genevieve Finnegan, a girl of Phœbe’s own age, declared that Miss Simpson’s house was stylish; while a teacher, touching on architecture one day, proudly catalogued it as “very English.”
Phœbe did not understand in just what way the school was “very English,” but she did come to realize, through Genevieve, that whatever very English might be, it was something much to be desired for any house. As for Grandma’s residence, well, Genevieve was politely scornful.
Phœbe readily understood why.