Rebecca's Promise

by Frances R. Sterrett

Rebecca Mary had time to gaze after her before a long yellow street car came and picked her up, and she thought again how very ungrandmotherly Mrs. Peter Simmons was with her twinkling face and her love of new fox trots. The grandmothers Rebecca Mary knew were staid, sedate women with aprons and knitting.

The second invitation to which Rebecca Mary had an opportunity to say "Yes, thank you" came the very next evening when one of the teachers in the Lincoln school offered her a ticket to a travel talk in an auditorium not three blocks from Rebecca Mary's "one room, kitchenette and bath." There must have been seven or eight hundred people there so that Rebecca Mary might be excused for looking for—old Mrs. Simmons, she told herself. But Mrs. Simmons was not there so far as Rebecca Mary could see, neither was her grandson. They were not at the school social, which was Rebecca Mary's next festal affair, nor at the concert to which she went with a woman who lived in the next apartment, and who was scared to death to go out after dark alone. Rebecca Mary began to lose faith in the crumpled clover leaf which she had put in an old locket and carried in her pocket, and no wonder. A talisman which was worth its salt should have brought better luck.

It was not as easy for Rebecca Mary to change the point of view which she had carefully cultivated for so many years as it would have been for her to change a blouse. There were many times when it seemed as if she just couldn't say "Yes, thank you." It would have been so much easier if she could have wrapped her old point of view in brown paper and carried it to a clerk at Bullok's or the Big Store and explained that it didn't fit at all, that it was far too narrow and too tight, and she should like to exchange it for one that was much larger and broader and which had some mystery in its frills. It seemed such bad management on the part of some one that there wasn't an exchange department for points of view at one of the big stores. But as there wasn't she did her best, and she had to see that the second time was easier than the first and the third time was easier than the second.

"If I live to be a hundred," she told herself a little impatiently one day, "I shall probably say 'Yes, thank you' mechanically. But by that time I won't care what I say, and no one else will care. Oh, dear, I almost wish Cousin Susan hadn't taken me to the Waloo for tea that day and stirred me all up. What's the use of thinking about things I can't ever have?"

And then because Cousin Susan had stirred her all up she threw out her little chin and clicked her white teeth together and murmured that she would have the things she thought about, yes, she would! She wouldn't be all stirred up for nothing. She just would have some good times to remember when she was an old woman and had nothing to do but remember the past.

In her eagerness to find the good times she forgot to frown and to scowl. Even the walk to school became interesting when she thought that romance might lurk around the corner, and as Rebecca Mary bravely struggled to forget her cares and see only her opportunities she began to look more like a real live girl, a girl who might have adventures. The sullen frown left her face, indeed, a little smile often tilted the corners of her lips as she let her imagination run riot. There was a new spring in her step because there was a new hope in her heart. Perhaps the four-leaf clover would bring something into her life besides taxes and insurance premiums.

At the Lincoln school where Rebecca Mary taught the third grade the principal believed firmly in a close relation between the home and the school, and to bring about this closer relation each teacher was expected to visit the family of each pupil at least once a term. Rebecca Mary was appalled when she discovered that it was the next to the last week of the term and she remembered how many calls she owed. While she was making out a list to be paid that very afternoon the principal came in to tell her that an urgent telephone message had just asked Joan Befort's teacher to come to Beforts' as soon as she possibly could.

"I said you would be down at once," went on Miss Weir. "Was Joan at school to-day?"

No, Rebecca Mary remembered that Joan hadn't been at school either that morning or that afternoon.

"Probably measles or mumps," prophesied Miss Weir, who had been made wise by years of experience. "Foreigners are so helpless at times. You will have to explain that the quarantine laws must be obeyed. What do you know about the Beforts?"