“I think,” she added, as she shut the door, “that it was hardly worth while to——”
“To shake Winnie?” interrupted Gypsy, demurely. “No, not at all; I ought to have known better.”
Mrs. Breynton did not offer to help Gypsy in the task which bade fair to be no easy one, of putting her room in order; but, with a few encouraging words, she went down stairs and left her. It would have been far easier for her to have gone to work and done the thing herself, than to see Gypsy’s face so clouded and discouraged. But she knew it would be the ruin of Gypsy. Her only chance of overcoming her natural thoughtlessness, and acquiring the habits of a lady, lay in the persistent doing over and over again, by her own unaided patience, these very things that came so hard to her. Gypsy understood this perfectly, and had the good sense to think her mother was just right about it. It was not want of training, that gave Gypsy her careless fashion of looking after things. Mrs. Breynton was a wise, as well as a loving mother, and had done everything in the way of punishment, reproof, warning, persuasion, and argument, that mothers can do for the faults of children. Nor was it for want of a good example, Mrs. Breynton was the very pink of neatness. It was a natural kink in Gypsy, that was as hard to get out as a knot in an apple-tree, and which depended entirely on the child’s own will for its eradication. This disorder in her room and about her toilet was only one development of it, and by no means a fixed or continued one. Gypsy could be, and half the time she was, as orderly and lady-like as anybody. She did everything by fits and starts. As Tom said, she was “always on the jump.” If her dress didn’t happen to be torn and her room dusty, why, she had a turn of forgetting everything. If she didn’t forget, she was always getting hurt. If it wasn’t that, she lost her temper every five minutes. Or else she was making terrible blunders, and hurting people’s feelings; something was always the matter; and some one was always on the qui vive, wondering what Gypsy was going to do next.
Yet, in spite of it all, the person who did not love Gypsy Breynton (provided he knew her) was not to be found in Yorkbury. Whether there was any reason for this, you can judge for yourself as the story goes on.
After her mother had gone down, Gypsy went to work in earnest. She picked up the beads, and put them back into the drawer which she left upon the floor. Then she attacked Tom’s image. It took her fully fifteen minutes merely to get the thing to pieces, for the true boy-fashion in which it was tied, pinned, sewed, and nailed together, would have been a puzzle to any feminine mind. She would have called Tom up to help her, but she was just a little bit too proud.
The broom she put out in the entry the first thing; then, remembering that that was not systematic, she carried it down stairs and hung it on its nail. The shoes and the dresses, the cape and the cloak, the tippet and the hat, she put in their places; the torn apron and the unmended stockings she tumbled into her basket, then went back and folded them up neatly; she also made a journey into the woodshed expressly to put the hatchet where it belonged, on the chopping-block. By this time it was quite dark, but she lighted a lamp, and went at it afresh. Winnie came up to the entry door, and, at a respectful distance, told her they were “popping” corn down stairs; but she shook her head, and proceeded with her dusting like a hero. Tom whistled for her up the chimney-flue; but she only gave a little thump on the floor, and said she was busy.
It was like walking into a labyrinth to dispose of the contents of that table-cloth. How to put away the pencils and the rubber, when the drawing-box was lost; how to collect all the cookey-crumbs and wandering needles, that slipped out of your finger as fast as you took hold of them; where on earth to put those torn geography leaves, that wouldn’t stay in the book, and couldn’t be thrown away; where was the cork to the inkstand? and how should she hang up the riding-whip, with the string gone? These were questions that might well puzzle a more systematic mind than Gypsy’s. However, in due time, the room was restored to an order that was delightful to see,—for, if Gypsy made up her mind to a thing, she could do it thoroughly and skilfully,—and she returned to the bureau drawer. This drawer was a fair specimen of the rest of Gypsy’s drawers, shelves, and cupboards, and their name was Legion. Moreover, it was an “upper drawer,” and where is the girl that does not know what a delicate science is involved in the rearranging of these upper drawers? So many laces, and half-worn collars that don’t belong there, are always getting in; loose coppers have such a way of accumulating in the crevices; all your wandering pins and hair-pins make it a rendezvous by a species of free-masonry utterly inexplicable; then your little boxes fit in so tightly, and never have room to open, and are always getting their covers caught when you shut the drawer, and, when you try to keep them down, you pinch your fingers so.
Please to imagine, O orderly readers! who keep every pin in its proper place, the worst looking upper drawer that your horrified eyes ever beheld, and you will have some idea of this drawer of Gypsy’s.
There were boxes large, and boxes small, boxes round, square, and oblong; boxes with covers (only two), and boxes without; handkerchiefs, under-sleeves, collars,—both clean and soiled,—laces and ribbons, and bows and nets; purses and old gloves, a piece of soap, a pile of letters, scratched and scattering jewelry, a piece of dried cake, several fans all covered with dust, and nobody knew what not, in the lower strata, out of sight.
Gypsy sat and looked at it for about two minutes in utter despair. Then she just turned the whole thing bottom upwards in a great heap on the floor, and began to investigate matters, with her cheeks very red.