But Vick, opening the door, saw a very straight, pigtailed figure walk resolutely down the long hall toward the attic stairs. Her quick “Well, kid, how did it go?” fell upon deaf ears, nor did Sidney so much as glance in her direction.
CHAPTER IV
SIDNEY DIGS FOR COUSINS
The Romley house stood two stories and a half high, heavy-beamed, thick-walled, of square spacious rooms with deep-set windows and cavernous fireplaces under low marble mantels. Joseph Romley had chosen it because he said it was so big a man could think in it; he liked the seclusion, too, that the surrounding wall promised. If his wife faltered before the care it presented she had given no sign but had bravely spread their limited possessions through some of the rooms and had sensibly closed off others.
There had never been a time since the Romleys took possession when the house had not needed painting and shingling, when the guarding wall was not crumbling and the gate swinging on one hinge, when the furnace was not needing cleaning and the plumbing overhauling. But the wind sang cheerily down the great chimneys and the sun poured in through the windows and the ancient elms housed hosts of birds and the hollyhocks bloomed early and late against the wall so that Joseph Romley knew only the beauty of the place and was content and his family, perforce, was content because he was.
There had never been enough of the fine old furniture Mrs. Romley had collected in her bridehood to furnish a separate room for each one of the girls. Isolde and Trude had always shared a sunny room over the study. In a back room Victoria and Sidney still used the narrow beds of nursery days. Only lately Victoria had painted them gray with a trim of pink rose buds but the effect had suffered so sharply from Sidney’s “truck” that Sidney had been coerced into taking her precious belongings to the attic where she established a kingdom of her own.
It was a beautiful attic. Its rafters, shiny and brown, were so low that Sidney, by standing very straight, could touch them with the top of her head. It had mysterious crannies and shadowy corners and deep dusty holes. Sidney had walled off one end by piling one trunk upon another and pushing an old wardrobe next to them. There she had her possessions, a flat-topped desk with long wobbly legs which she reached by a box balanced on an old stool, the skeleton of a sofa on which sat five dusty and neglected dolls, a scrap of carpeting, amazing as to red roses but sadly frayed about its edges, one boastful rocker in complete possession of arms and legs, which Trude had smuggled up to her, and a conglomeration of her favorite books scattered everywhere, for in the seclusion of the attic she could pore over them without risk of some Lady Leaguer discovering her love of them.
To this sanctuary Sidney retreated now from Vick and the Leaguers and her luckless lot. Swinging open the door of the wardrobe so as to shut off any unannounced approach to her den, she tiptoed to a corner, knelt down and cautiously lifted a board from the floor, thereby revealing a space two feet square between the beams.
From among the treasures concealed there she drew out an old ledger on the first page of which was printed in large type: “Dorothea, friend and confidante of Sidney Romley.” Jerking herself closer to the window she opened the book across her knees and began to write in it with the stub of a pencil she extracted from the pocket of her middy blouse.
“Dearest Dorothea:
“Today I stand at a crossroad of life. I am fifteen. It is not my birthday for I had my birthday as you will see if you turn back to page 64 but I am fifteen today in the eyes of the world for I have come into my legal and just rights. I am to have the next Egg. I had to make a scene before I got them to promise I could have it but it was ever thus with rights. I swear solemnly now to you, dear Dorothea, that I shall never cry again in front of Victoria Romley. Never. I hate her when she laughs. I do not hate Isolde even though she does not understand me and that is hard. And I adore Trude as I have told you on many other pages. However, I am to have the Egg.