CHAPTER XVIII
WHO WAS MISS FINEFEATHER
Roberta stepped into a drug store to inquire the way to the address that she had upon a slip of brown paper. The clerk happened to know the locality without referring to the directory, and Bobs was thanking him when one of the customers exclaimed in a voice that plainly expressed the speaker’s great joy: “Bobsy Vandergrift, of all people! Where in the world are you girls living? Dick wrote me that you had left Long Island, but he failed to tell me where you had located?”
It was Kathryn De Laney who, as she talked, drew Bobs into a quiet booth. The girls seated themselves and clasped hands across the table.
“Oh, Kathy,” Bobs said, her eyes glowing with the real pleasure that she felt, “I’ve been meaning to look you up, for Gloria’s sake, if for no other reason. I heard Glow say only the other day that she wanted to see you. I believe you’d do her worlds of good. You’re so breezy and cheerful.”
Kathryn looked troubled. “Why, is anything especially wrong with Glow?”
“She’s brooding because Gwen doesn’t write,” Bobs said. Then she told briefly all that had happened: how Gwen had refused to come with the others to try to earn her living, and how instead she had departed without saying good-bye to them to visit her school friend, Eloise Rochester, and how letters, sent there by Gloria, had been returned marked “Whereabouts unknown.”
“I honestly believe that Gloria thinks of nothing else. I’ve watched her when she was pretending to read, and she doesn’t turn a page by the hour. I had just about made up my mind to put an advertisement of some kind in the paper. Not that I’m crazy about Gwen myself. There’s no excuse for one sister being so superlatively selfish and disagreeable as she is, but Gloria believes, she honestly does, that if we are patient and loving, Gwen will change in time, because after all she is our mother’s daughter.”
“Gloria is right,” was the quiet answer. “I am sure of that. You all helped to spoil Gwen when she was a child because she was frail. Then later you let her have her own way because you dreaded her temper spells, but I honestly believe that a few hard knocks will do much toward readjusting Gwendolyn’s outlook upon life.”
“But, Kathryn!” Bobs exclaimed. “Don’t you know that Gwen couldn’t stand hard knocks? If it were a case of sink or swim, Gwen would just give up and sink.”
“I’m not so sure,” the girl who had been next door neighbor to the Vandergrifts all her life replied. “It’s an instinct with all of us to at least try to keep our heads above water.” Then she added: “But didn’t I hear you asking the clerk about an address? That was what first attracted my attention to you, because it is the same locality as my destination. I’m visiting nurse now on the lower West Side.”