"He could have kept her at a fashionable boarding-school from the day she was born until now for the sum he's turned over to the Board," said Mrs. Carr, and her eyes, which are the beaming kind, just danced, Peelie said.
"Well, he ought to," grunted Mrs. Dent, who talks like her tongue was down her throat. "He ought to! We've been taking care of the child for almost ten years. I hear he wants the house put in good condition, a new dining-room and kitchen built and four bath-rooms. The rest is to go to the endowment. I think more ought to go to the endowment and less for these luxuries. I don't approve of them. An Orphan Asylum is not a hotel."
"No, but it ought to be a home, if possible," said Mrs. Carr, and Peelie said she looked at Mrs. Dent like she wondered how under heaven her husband stood her all the time.
I certainly am glad to know I'm paid for. Some day, when I'm grown and earning my own living, before I marry my children's father, I am going to give as much as I can of that money back to Uncle Parke. Of course that will be some time off, and until then I'll just have to try to be a nice person.
Miss Katherine says a whole lot of people would pay a big price to have a nice person in the house with them—one of those cheerful, sunshiny kind that helps and is encouraging, and gets up again when they fall down. As I can't earn money yet, I'm going to try to be something like that, so they won't be sorry I ever was born. Uncle Parke and Miss Katherine won't.
But isn't it strange, when the time comes for you to do a thing you are crazy to do, you wish it hadn't come?
There have been days when I hated this Asylum. I've felt at times that I was just one of the numbers of the multiplication table, and in all my life I'd never be anything else. And I'd almost sweep the bricks up out of the yard, I'd be so mad to think I was nothing and nobody.
I wanted to be something and somebody. I didn't want to die and be forgotten. I would have liked to sit on St. John's Church steeple and have everybody look at me and say:
"That's Mary Cary! She's great and rich, and gives away lots of money and sings like an angel." That's what I once would have liked, but I've learned a few things since I didn't know then.
One is that high places are lonely and hard and uncomfortable, and people who have sat on them have sometimes wished they didn't. Miss Katherine told me that herself, also that the place you're in is pretty near what you're fitted to fill. Otherwise you'd get out and fill another.