Jean watched them amusedly. Kit and Helen had always been the two who had loved to make believe they were “somebody else,” as Helen called it. “Let’s play we’re somebody else,” had been their unfailing slogan for diversion and variety, but Jean lived in the world of reality. She was Jean Robbins, living today, not Melisande in an enchanted forest, nor Berengaria, not even Kit’s favorite warrior maid, Jeanne D’Arc. Helen could do up the supper dishes all by herself, and forget the sordid details entirely making believe she was the Lady of Tripoli waiting for Rudel’s barque to appear, but Jean experienced all of the deadly sameness in everyday life. She could not sweep and dust a room and make believe she was at the spring exhibitions. She could not face a basket of inevitable mending, and imagine herself in a castle garden clad in clinging green velvet with stag hounds pacing at her heels.
When they had first come to the country to live, it had been comical, this difference in the girls’ temperaments. Mrs. Robbins had wanted a certain book in her room upstairs, after dark, and had asked Helen to run up after it. And Helen had hesitated, plainly distressed.
“For pity’s sake, Helenita, run along,” Jean had said laughingly. “You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?”
“I don’t know,” Helen had answered, doubtfully. “Maybe I am. I’m the only one in the family with imagination.”
Sometimes Jean almost envied the two their complete self-absorption. She was never satisfied with herself or her relation to her environment. Seeing so many needs, she felt a certain lack in herself when she shrank from the little duties that crowded on her, and stole away her time. She had brought up from New York a fair supply of material for study, and had laid out work ahead for the winter evenings, but the days were slipping by, and time was short. Her pads of drawing paper lay untouched in her desk drawer. Not a single new pencil had been used, not a stick of crayon touched. The memory of Daddy Higginson driving his herd of cattle cheered her more than anything when she felt discouraged. And after all, when she thought of the California trip and what a benefit it would be to her father, that thought alone made her put every regret from her, and face tomorrow pluckily.
“I’m half frozen,” Doris said suddenly, just as they swung around a bend of the river, and faced long levels of snow-covered meadows. “Oh, girls, look there.” She stopped short, the rest halting too. Crossing over the frozen land daintily, following a big antlered leader, were five deer. Straight down to the river edge they came, only three fields from the girls.
“They’ve got a path to their drinking place,” said Sally. “Don’t move, any of you.”
“Oh, I wonder if ours is there,” Doris whispered. “He hasn’t been with the cows since the storm passed, but I know I could tell him from the rest. He had a dark patch of brown on his shoulder.”
“There’s only one with antlers,” Sally answered. “I hope the hunters won’t find them. I never could bear hunters. Maybe if we had to depend on them for food it would be different, but when they just come up here and kill for fun, well, my mother says she just hopes some day it’ll all come back to them good and plenty.”
“Yes, and who eats squirrel pie with the rest of us,” her brother teased. “And partridge too. She’s only talking.”