[CHAPTER II]
Rebecca Mary walked home on air. If she didn't hippity-hop outside, she did inside. She held her head high, and her gray eyes were almost black with excitement. A delightful mystery tingled through her. Usually when Rebecca Mary walked home from down town she had to wonder whether she might have bought her gloves cheaper if she had gone to the Big Store or if the shoes at Ballok's were better for the money. But as she walked swiftly home from the Waloo that May afternoon she never once remembered what might have been saved. She had pleasanter things than saving to think of.
I doubt very much if Rebecca Mary would have kept her promise to Cousin Susan if it had not been for that mysterious four-leaf clover. Not that Rebecca Mary was the sort of girl to regard a promise as a new laid egg, easily broken, for she wasn't. When Rebecca Mary made a promise it was generally as solid and unbreakable as a block of concrete. But she did think that Cousin Susan was such a sentimental old silly, and anyway her old age could never be Cousin Susan's old age and consequently it didn't really matter a copper cent to Cousin Susan how poor and dependent Rebecca Mary was when she was fifty. Rebecca Mary shuddered at the mere thought of being fifty. Looking back, she saw a long stretch of yesterdays, an awful gray and uninteresting distance, and if she didn't wish to have it fifty years long, fifty times three hundred and sixty-five stupid gray days, why, really it was time to do something, as Cousin Susan had said, to introduce another color. The four-leaf clover presented quite a touch of another color, and the bright green was as puzzling as it was brightening for it never hinted in any curve or crumple where it came from.
But some one must have deliberately thrust it into her hand. It never could have reached her fingers by any kind of an accident. And who was the thruster? How Rebecca Mary would like to have that question answered in the way she imagined it might be answered! She wanted to be told in short convincing words that young Peter Simmons had given her the talisman, but Common Sense jumped to her shoulder and whispered in her ear that that was not only ridiculous, it was impossible. Impossible may be, as Mirabeau insisted, a stupid word, and yet it is a word which quite frequently stands like a stone wall in front of people. Rebecca Mary did not need Common Sense to tell her that young aviator heroes do not carry four-leaf clovers carelessly in their pockets. But then who does in a town like Waloo where patches of four-leaf clovers are as scarce as paving stones are plenty? It was curious and irritating and altogether amazingly delightful. Rebecca Mary scarcely thought of the third grade of the Lincoln school that evening, and she most certainly did not dream of the third grade of the Lincoln school that night.
You can easily imagine how disappointed Rebecca Mary was when she received the first invitation to which she was to say "Yes, thank you," instead of the "I can't possibly" which had always slipped so automatically over her lips. By all the rules of romance she had every right to expect that it would be to some gathering which would bring her at least in sight of young Peter Simmons, and so when Olga Klavachek begged her to come and see their new baby she did have to make an effort to keep the old negative phrase from popping out of her mouth, for what on earth would she get for her old age meditation, what memory insurance, Cousin Susan had called it, at Klavachek's?
But she had promised Cousin Susan so she let Olga take her hand and went to see the new baby. Mrs. Klavachek was as round-faced and as plump as Olga, and although she spoke no English, and Rebecca Mary spoke no Slavic, they managed to understand each other very well. A baby is a baby and even a baby tied in a big feather pillow cannot be mistaken for a new hat or a new arm chair. The Klavachek baby was as round as a butter ball and had eyes like bright brown beads. Rebecca Mary could honestly admire him, and Mrs. Klavachek beamed on "Olga's teacher lady."
Besides the new baby Olga showed Rebecca Mary her mother's new shoes and her father's new boots and the wonderful earrings her mother had brought from Serbia and the new broom she had bought up on Poplar Avenue and the flag her papa had got off the place where he worked, the Peter Simmons Factory, and the calendar which the butcher had given her and the picture of George Washington which she had begged from the grocer because George Washington was her father now that she was an American and George Washington was the father of America.