DR. JOE’S VALENTINE.
There were half-a-dozen of the girls together,—pretty creatures, in the very first season of their long dresses,—the eldest not quite sixteen. They were all braids and puffs and fluffy curls, all loops and ruffles and ribbons, all smiles and dimples. It was the Saturday before Valentine’s Day, in a certain year of grace, of which I will not give you the precise date, but less than ten years ago, and more than five. Of the half-dozen girls, two are busy teachers now, two are married, one is playing mother to her brother’s little brood of orphan children, and the sixth, not less happy than the rest, has gone on to “the next country,” where they tell us she will never grow old, never be sick or sorry any more,—happy Bertha, whom, surely, God loved.
But, that day in February, none of them thought much about the future: the present was enough, with its fun and frolic, its wealth of all the pleasures which girlhood holds dear. The six were passing the long day together. Two of them were sisters and belonged in one house, and the rest had come there to be with them; for they were all going to make valentines. They had made funny ones and foolish ones, tender ones, with just a little dash of satire in them, poetic ones and prosy ones; and at last it was dinner-time, a feast of all the things that school-girls love, and these were hungry girls. At least they were all hungry girls but Nelly Hunt, and she scarcely ate any dinner at all, she was so busy thinking. She was Bertha’s sister, and this was her home and Bertha’s, and it was to the girls’ own room that the little party went back again, after they had eaten and praised Mrs. Hunt’s dinner.
“What are you thinking about, Nell?” Bertha asked, sitting on the arm of Nelly’s chair.
“These valentines,” Nelly answered slowly.
“Well, surely they need not make you sober,—they are absurd enough.”
“Yes, and it’s just because they are so absurd that they make me sober. I was wondering why we couldn’t just as well have said something to help somebody—to make somebody think—to do some good.”