Making Over Martha

by Julie M. Lippmann

Miss Crewe bit her lip to keep from smiling. "You've been very kind to us, Mrs. Slawson. I don't know how to thank you," she said.

When Martha had gone the girl rose, hurriedly bathed and dressed, then made her way to her grandmother. She did not know much about nursing, but she knew she must not carry a long face into a sick-room, and the question was, how to help it. Her heart was very heavy. Ever since the attack yesterday afternoon, her mind had been going over and over what this sickness was bound to entail. Things had been hard enough before, but she saw how this might add intolerable burdens, and, in the face of it, she must look cheerful, give no sign of the discouragement she felt.

That was the way it was with everything in her life, she brooded. She was continually under some sort of crushing necessity to hold in, and hold back. She had never been free, as most girls of her age are, and there seemed no prospect that she ever would be. On the contrary, there was every likelihood she would be more and more confined and restricted, as the years went on, if, as the doctor had said, this was but the beginning of the end. The future looked desperately black. As for the past, she could remember a time, away back, when she was a little girl, when things had been very different.

A child's mind does not measure and weigh according to scale, and Katherine could not fix the precise degree of her mother's grace, her father's dashing beauty, the luxury of the home in which they, all three, lived. But she had more than her memory to rely upon. There were likenesses, there were relics, there were the continual jibes of her grandmother through recent years, to the effect that she "had been brought up like a fool; it was time she learned better."

At her mother's death, her father had carried her to his parents' home. Looking back, she had no sense of having suffered surprise or disappointment by the change. The new home must have compared favorably with the old. She could remember her grandfather's table—a most formidable function, to which she was conducted, at dessert, by a nervous nurse, "afraid of her life there'll be a to-do if you don't look right, an' hold up your head, an' speak out when you're spoken to, Miss Kath'rine."

Her father's sudden death had made no change in outward conditions. It was when her grandfather passed away that there was a difference. Then, suddenly, she seemed to wake one morning to a realization of lack. She could not be at all certain her impression was correct. The alteration might have been so gradual, she had failed to notice it, and it was her consciousness of the fact, and not the fact itself, that came upon her abruptly. The way did not matter, the fact did. It all summed itself up to this, that the grudging hand was certainly not her grandfather's, much less her father's. They had been open-handed to a fault. The one who stinted, of whom the country-people 'round about said: "She'll pinch a penny till the eagle screams," was—

"Katherine!"

The girl started guiltily at the sound of the thick, labored syllables.

"Yes, grandmother." She was at the bed's side in a moment.

"That doctor—— He's not to come again, understand? Call Driggs."