“So?” returned the grocer, frowning. “Very well,” and he deliberately unpacked the parcels and handed her the basket—making a show of so doing in the presence of the newly arrived customer. “And what can I do for you, this evening, Mrs. Brown?” he asked, blandly, speaking to the new arrival while he handed Jess her basket without a word.
“And that woman will tell about it all over town!” thought the girl, as she hurried into the street. “Oh, dear, dear! whatever shall I do?”
For the cupboard at the Morse cottage was very bare indeed. Mrs. Mary Morse had some little standing as a contributor to the more popular magazines; but the returns from her pen-work being her entire means of income, there were sometimes weary waitings for checks. Jess had been used to these unpleasant occasions ever since she was a very little girl. Her mother was of a nervous temperament and easily disturbed; and as Jess had grown she had tried to shield her mother, at these times of famine, from its most unpleasant features.
As witness her passage-at-arms with the grocer, Mr. Closewick. No money in the house, an empty pantry, their credit cut off at the store where they had always traded, and no credit established at any other grocer’s shop! The situation looked desperate, indeed, to Jess Morse.
Jess shrank from trying the butcher’s and the dairy store, too. At each shop an unpaid bill would stare her in the face and to-night she felt as though each proprietor would demand a “payment on account.” It was a black night indeed. November was going out in its very mournfullest and dismallest manner.
And for Jess Morse there was an added burden of disappointment and trouble. She was not able to attend the M. O. R. reception, although she was a member. Laura Belding, her very dearest friend, would be there and would wonder why she, Jess, did not appear. And after the reception Chet Belding, Laura’s brother, would be waiting to take Jess home—she hadn’t had the heart to tell Chet that she would not need his escort from the reception.
But, as Jess had told her mother, that blue party dress had become impossible. Let alone its being months behind the fashion, it was frayed around the bottom and the front breadth was sorely stained. And she hadn’t another gown fit to put on in the evening. She did so long for something to wear at a party in which her friends would not know her two blocks away. So she had “cut” the reception at the M. O. R. house.
All this was a heavy load on Jess Morse’s mind as she approached, with hesitating steps, the butter and egg shop kept by Mr. Vandergriff.
“Certainly,” thought the troubled girl, “I either need a whole lot of courage, or a lot of money—either would come in very handy to-night.”
Just then Jess was aroused from her brown study by hearing somebody calling breathlessly after her.