Then she faced him again: “I think,” she said quietly, “that it would save Susanna’s pride as well as ours if you didn’t take this matter up with the church board. She’s as old as I am; she probably would feel as keenly as I should about it. She didn’t want to take the petticoat; I made her do it. But she really needed it, Father, she truly needed it awfully. And she needs a great many other things just as badly. Don’t bring me anything the next time you go to the city, but let me come after school to-morrow and give me the clothing that will make Susanna comfortable. Will you, dear?”
When Mahala said, “Will you, dear?” there was not a thing on earth that Mahlon Spellman would not have undertaken to do for her, because it would have broken his heart to admit to her that there was anything on earth that he could not do for her if he chose.
“Certainly,” he said suavely. “Most certainly!”
That night, in the privacy of their bed chamber, Mahlon told Elizabeth that it was the easiest thing in the world to manage Mahala; when he had put the matter to her in the proper light, she had immediately offered to go and recover the petticoat, but he had felt that it was beneath their dignity to allow her to ask to be given back a gift. It might look as if they were in straitened circumstances, or as if they could not trust their daughter to do what was right and proper upon any given occasion. He told his wife, also, that he had arranged with Mahala to come to him after school the following day and he would secretly provide Susanna with comfortable clothing so that she might continue with her school work.
Elizabeth immediately fell upon his neck and kissed him. She told him that he was the most wonderful, the most generous of men. Mahlon expanded with her appreciation until he slept that night with a beatific smile illumining his face. He never felt more thoroughly that he had justified himself to himself and to Elizabeth than he did in the matter of Susanna and the Spellman petticoat, while he could trust the clerks in his store, through a few words he could drop, to let his townsmen know of his essential rightness and benevolence.
Because of many diverse ramifications in Mahala’s life similar to the petticoat affair, she always had been made to feel that she had the devoted love of every boy and girl in each advancing grade of her school work. Her teachers always depended upon her to tell them the truth concerning any occasion in the schoolroom otherwise inexplainable.
Mahala’s mother had told her that she might invite her particular friends for the celebration of her birthday, so Mahala was busy delivering the invitations. She was also extremely busy facing a very uncomfortable condition. There was no one in the room who was not her friend so far as she knew. There was no one to whom she had not been lovely and gracious. There was no one who did not think her beautiful, who was not proud to be seen in proximity to her. But Mahala very well understood that her father and mother would not want to entertain in their home the Susannas of the town and neither would they wish to entertain the Jasons. That, she knew, was an utter impossibility, and yet, in her heart, she distinctly rebelled.
Jason always had been the best scholar in any grade to which he had advanced but Mahala knew that she dared not ask him to be her guest. She watched his lean figure as he crossed the playground. He would go to the well, take a drink of water, stretch up his arms toward heaven as if he were imploring that the gift of equality with the other children should be dropped into his hands. He would cast a slow glance of longing at the boys playing ball and leap-frog, then he would reënter the building, go to his desk and spend ten minutes on his next lesson, while the other pupils were playing.
She never had known him to practise an evasion. She never had known him, no matter how hard pressed, to do an unkind thing or to tell a lie. Sometimes, when unobserved she looked at him between narrowed lids, there came a feeling that, as he grew older and his lean frame filled out and became better clothed and his face took on maturity, he would be a pleasing figure physically. She dared not invite him to come to her party. Yet that imp of perversity that had always lived in the back of Mahala’s head and found dancing ground on the platform of her heart, possessed her strongly at that minute.
She managed to pass near him, while as she did so, she said in a low voice: “I am asking my friends to come to my birthday party this week and I wish that I might invite you.”