"So if Miss Anton will get Madame's permission for the change, I have no doubt we can make at least three hundred dollars."
"Nonsense! we will make twice that," said Puss Hastings.
"I know the sweetest thing," said Little Breeze. "A Venetian Fête! It is really a fair, but the booths are all made to represent gondolas. They are painted black, and have their prows turned toward the centre of the room. We can have it in the gymnasium. The gondolas are canopied in different colors and hung with bright lanterns. We must all be dressed in Venetian costume, and have music and some pretty dances. It will be lovely!"
The fair was planned out: each girl had a gondola assigned her, with permission to work other girls in, and enthusiasm had reached a high pitch, when the retiring-bell clanged and the Hornets took their departure, the utmost good feeling prevailing between what had been until this evening rival factions of the school.
After our next botany lesson we lingered to inform Miss Prillwitz of what we had done, and to ask her to accept the Presidency of our ten. She listened with much interest.
"My tears," she said, "I sink perhaps you s'all do much good. I have justly been sinking, sinking; but ze need is great. I know not how we s'all come at ze money which we do need."
Then Miss Prillwitz explained that she had visited Rickett's Court, and had found so many little children in those vile surroundings; some of them, whose mothers were servants in families, and received good wages, were "boarding" with Mrs. Grogan, the baby-farmer. She had met one such mother in the court—a waitress on Fifth Avenue, who had three children with Mrs. Grogan.
"I pay her fifteen dollars a month," she said; "it is cheaper than I can board them elsewhere, and all that I can pay; but it makes my heart sick to see them sleeping and playing beside sewers and sinks, and to have them exposed to language of infinitely worse foulness. I know that if they do not die in childhood, of which there is every likelihood, they will grow up bad; and I don't know which I would choose for them. I wouldn't mind slaving for them, if there was any hope, if I could see them in decent surroundings, with some prospect of their turning out well in the end; but now, when I ask myself what all my toil amounts to, it seems to me that the best thing which could happen to us all would be to die."
The waitress knew of other servants who could have no home of their own for their children, but who could pay something for their support, and whose maternal love and feeling of independence kept them from giving their children up to institutions; who had entrusted their little ones to bad people, who hired them to beggars, beat and half starved them. And now the summer was approaching, and it was dreadful to think of those closely packed tenement houses under the stifling heat.