CHAPTER III
TIA
“WHO mended the rip in my glove?” Jacquette demanded, as she stood in her coat and hat, ready to start for school. “Tia, you angel! Stop hiding behind that paper!”
A pair of brown eyes laughed over the top of the newspaper. Then a slight woman in a dark red morning gown, emerged into sight. “I do feel guilty,” she admitted, roguishly. “I ought to have trained you so well that you’d have mended it yourself.”
“Oh, I think you’ve done pretty well, considering the material you had to work on,” was the light-hearted answer, and Jacquette stopped to rearrange her hat before the mantel mirror as she spoke. “You don’t know how afraid I was all day yesterday that some of the sorority girls would call me to account for that glove! They’re frightfully particular about such things.”
“Do they mind little things like a button missing from a shoe?” Aunt Sula asked, demurely. “If they do, I think I’ll petition them to labour with someone I know.”
“Oh, dear, does that show? I didn’t think it could with this long dress. It seems to me I can’t get time to do the things I ought to.”
Two months of school had gone, and Jacquette was living, with her grandfather and Aunt Sula, in a comfortable little home only a few blocks from Malcolm Granville’s large one. The pearl-set blue and gold pin, worn over her heart, proclaimed that she had been initiated into her sorority, and her beautiful hair, tucked up in the back of her neck, and thoroughly hidden by the conventional big bow, was witness to the fact that the Sigma Pi girls considered long, curly braids too childish.
Not only had all the dresses brought from Brookdale been lengthened, but Aunt Fannie, prompted by Uncle Mac’s fondness for his pretty niece, had amused herself by buying several new gowns for her, so that Aunt Sula, whose loving interest had gone into every garment Jacquette had worn since she was a tiny girl, felt an odd pang as she gazed after the smart young woman who started for school, morning after morning, in unfamiliar costumes.
Sula Granville had not married, but her heart was a mother heart, and the love she felt for this child of her only sister was mother love. Ever since she came to Channing, she had been missing Jacquette’s sunny presence about the house, missing the spirit of helpful comradeship which she had grown to depend on in the Brookdale home, but, at the same time, she had realised that Jacquette was breathlessly busy from eight in the morning, when she started for high school, until ten and after, every night, and the more she studied the condition, the more helpless she found herself in coping with it.
“I know how full your time is,” she sympathised, now; “couldn’t you plan to come home right after school, to-day, and do some of the left-overs?”