“O! And I forgot all about helping with supper. What will mother think?”
Algernon watched her hasten away up the hill, and turned toward his own home with some anxiety. He had to coax his mother to take an interest in the new undertaking, and wished the operation over, but he squared his shoulders and determined to do his best and do it that very evening.
Catherine, for her part, spent the evening discussing the plan with her already sympathetic mother.
“It almost takes my breath away, Mother dear,” she confided as they sat on the porch in the dusk, watching the fireflies, “the way people fall in with suggestions. It didn’t occur to me before that I could start things going. But at college I had only to see that something should be done, and then to say so; and it almost always was done. And I was more surprised than anybody!”
Dr. Helen smiled, and put out her hand to stroke Catherine’s head, which rested on her knee.
24“They were pretty good ideas, I judge.”
“They were perfectly simple ones. Just little things like having the mail-boxes assigned alphabetically, instead of by the numbers of the rooms. It saved the mail girls a lot of work, and Miss Watkins was glad of the suggestion. I helped Alice sort mail, you know,–she does it to help pay her way. And then the little notices on the bulletin board were always getting lost under the big ones, and I was on a Students’ committee and often had notices to post, and I got them to make a rule that all notices should be written on a certain size sheet, and the board looks much neater now. And then there weren’t any door-blocks. Aunt Clara told me that they had them at Vassar, little pads hanging outside your door, with a pencil attached, and if you are out, your callers leave their messages, you know. It seemed as though we needed something like that, for some of us don’t like walking into people’s rooms, and hunting around for paper. So I started that, and they all took it up in no time. They were only little things, but it was remembering a lot of little things like that that made me dare try to get the library. It’s what we need, and I do believe it’s going to come easily.”
“Mr. Kittredge asked me to-day if I thought you would take the infant class in the Sunday-school for the summer. Mrs. Henley is to be away. I told him I’d ask you.” Dr. Helen waited.
25Catherine was silent a moment.
“Do you know, Mother, it seems as though you just get started doing one thing and you see another one ahead of you. If I am going around asking every one to help the library, I don’t see how I can refuse to help when I’m asked! But I never did teach anybody. Who is in the class?”