“I was thinking of Mother, dear, and wishing I could better take her place to you younger girls, and too, I am worried, just a little, because Gwendolyn does not write. It was a great sorrow to me, Pet, to find that she had left without saying good-bye, and I can’t help but fear that I was hasty when I told her that she must plan her life apart from us if she could not be more harmonious.”
Then, rising, she added: “Ah, well, things will surely turn out for the best, little girl. Come now, let us do our bit of tidying and then go over to the Settlement House and find out what my hours are to be.”
But all that day, try as she might to be cheerful, the mothering heart of Gloria was filled with anxiety concerning her two charges. Would all be well with the venturous Bobs, and why didn’t Gwen write?
CHAPTER VII.
BOBS SEEKS A PROFESSION
There was no anxiety in the heart of Roberta. In her short walking suit of blue tweed, with a jaunty hat atop of her waving brown hair, she was walking a brisk pace down Third Avenue. Even at that early hour foreign women with shawls over their heads and baskets on their arms were going to market. It was a new experience to Roberta to be elbowed aside as though she were not a descendant of a long line of aristocratic Vandergrifts. The fact that she was among them, made her one of them, was probably their reasoning, if, indeed, they noticed her at all, which she doubted. Gwen would have drawn her skirts close, fearing contamination, but not so Bobs. She reveled in the new experience, feeling almost as though she were abroad in Bohemia, Hungary or even Italy, for the dominant nationality of the crowd changed noticeably before she had gone many blocks. How wonderfully beautiful were some of the young Italian matrons, Bobs thought; their dark eyes shaded with long lashes, their natural grace but little concealed by bright-colored shawls.
At one corner where the traffic held her up, the girl turned and looked at the store nearest, her attention being attracted by a spray of lilacs that stood within among piles of dusty old books. It seemed strange to see that fragrant bit of springtime in a gloomy second-hand shop so far from the country where it might have blossomed. As Bobs gazed into the shop, she was suddenly conscious of a movement within, and then, out of the shadows, she saw forms emerging. An old man with a long flowing beard and the tight black skull cap so often worn by elderly men of the East Side was pushing a wheeled chair in which reclined a frail old woman, evidently his wife. In her face there was an expression of suffering patiently borne which touched the heart of the young girl.
The chair was placed close to the window that the invalid might look out at the street if she wished and watch the panorama passing by.
Instantly Bobs knew the meaning of the lilac, or thought that she did, and, also, she at once decided that she wished to purchase a book, and she groped about in her memory trying to recall a title for which she might inquire. A detective story, of course, that was what she wanted. Since it was to be her chosen profession, she could not read too many of them.
The old man had disappeared by this time, but when Bobs entered the dingy shop the woman smiled up at her, and, to Roberta’s surprise, she heard herself saying, “Oh, may I have just one little sniff of your lilac? I adore them, don’t you?”
The woman in the chair nodded, and her reply was in broken English, which charmed her listener. She said that her “good man” bought her a “blossom by the flower shop” every day, though she did tell him he shouldn’t, she knowing that to do it he had to go without himself, but it’s the only “bit of brightness he can be giving me,” my good man says.