Beryl tossed her head. "I could have just settled down into a drudge, working all day and too tired at night to care what I did and saving just enough out of my pay envelope to buy me a hair-net but I wouldn't begin! I wouldn't! They can all call me proud and lazy but I'll show them—old Henri Jacques and Martini himself said I would! But I've had to fight to make people believe me—and I s'pose I'll have to go on fighting." To the egotism of sixteen years these words sounded very grand; it stirred Beryl to think she had fought for every advantage that was hers, to read the admiration in Robin's eyes. She had no thought of disloyalty in claiming the credit that really belonged to the little mother who had dreamed the dream first for her girl and then, through years of work and self-denial, had lived for that dream to come true.
After the arrival of the violin Beryl promptly lost herself in a trance of rapture that left Robin to her own pursuits. Only once the quite human thought flashed to her mind that Beryl might be a little bit interested in what she wanted to do but she put it away as unworthy for, she told herself, Beryl, destined one day to stand on a pedestal, could not be expected to bother with such every-day things as planning "fun" for the Mill children.
So Robin left Beryl with her beloved instrument and went alone to talk to Mrs. Lynch who was so startled at her unexpected coming that she kissed her and called her "little Robin" before she realized what she was doing. That, and the fact that she found Mrs. Lynch working in the shed where big Danny could not hear them, made it much easier for Robin to talk and talk she did, so rapidly and so imploringly that Mrs. Moira had to interject more than once: "Now wait a bit, dearie. What was that again?"
Robin wanted to know about how many Mill children there were.
"Oh, bless the heart of you, it's no one but the doctor himself can tell you that! They slip in and out of the world as quiet like. But Mrs. Whaley says the school's so full that her Tommy can only go afternoons."
Robin remembered Beryl pointing out a dingy brick building as the schoolhouse. It had a play-yard enclosed on three sides with a high board fence, disfigured by much scrawling. It had seemed an ugly spot. She thought of that now.
"And what do the girls—the girls like me—do?"
"Oh, they mostly work. After work? Well, they help at home and do a bit of sewing maybe and some have beaux and they walk down to the drug store and hang around there visiting, though Beryl doesn't. 'Tisn't much of a life a girl in a place like this has," and Mrs. Moira's sigh was happily reminiscent of her own girlhood in open clean spaces, "it's old they grow before their time."
"They don't have much fun, do they?" Robin asked.
Mrs. Lynch looked at her curiously. "Fun? They work so hard that they haven't the gumption to start the fun. But it's so big the world is, Miss Robin, that it can't all be rosy. Sure, there has to be some dark corners."