Janice Day, the Young Homemaker

by Helen Beecher Long

There was waste in the kitchen. Mrs. Watkins was a big eater, but a delicate eater. She never wished to see the same thing on the table twice. A poor family could have been fed fairly well from what the woman flung into the garbage.

Janice had never been used to seeing such recklessness, even when only an ignorant servant was doing the work. At those times food was bought with a less lavish hand. Now there was seldom anything left, so Mrs. Watkins said, from one meal to warm up for another.

"I don't know what to do—I really don't," Janice confessed to Any Carringford who, by this time, had become her very closest friend and confidante. "Daddy has many business troubles, I know. It bothers him greatly to be annoyed by household matters. And he ought not to be so annoyed. But that woman!"

"It is too bad, honey," Amy said. "I wish my mother could help you. She knows everything about housekeeping."

"I know that is so," agreed Janice. "I wish Mrs. Watkins was a lady like your mother, Amy. Then the house would go all right and daddy needn't be bothered at all. I feel I ought to do something; but I don't know what."

Aside from cooking the meals, which she did very nicely, it must be confessed, Mrs. Watkins gradually allowed most of the responsibility for the housework to slide on to Janice's young shoulders.

The young girl got up an hour earlier than usual, and she busied herself sweeping and dusting and making beds right up to the minute she had to seize her books and lunch and run to school. She was quite sure that Mrs. Watkins went back to bed after breakfast, and really did little towards keeping the house in order until afternoon.

And if there was any scrubbing, or hard work to do, that was left until Saturday. Nobody ever saw Mrs. Watkins on her knees, unless it was at her devotions!

However, Janice Day was too sanguine to be made melancholy by these affairs. She was of a naturally cheerful nature—an attribute she inherited from her father. It took more than the faded-out lady to cause the girl overwhelming anxiety.

The stroke that had been the hardest for her to bear since her mother's death was the loss of the treasure-box and the heirlooms in it. Whether or not the Swedish girl, Olga Cedarstrom, had carried the valuables away with her, Janice felt all the time that she had only herself to blame because of the loss. And she realized that the loss of the packet of letters had saddened daddy dreadfully.