Already she was aware that among the four new Ranch Girls, Jeanette would probably be her chief problem, if she were to succeed in her determination to make friends.
Her husband had assured her otherwise. Jeanette always appeared easy enough to manage, provided one did not interfere with her tastes too seriously. She was boyish and frank and fond of the outdoors, a little as he recalled Jack herself to have been. If she were wilful now and then, she was seldom sullen. Always she was quick to forget an unpleasantness.
Jack had not the same impression. Not knowing Jeanette intimately, yet the year she had spent at Rainbow Lodge had afforded her a better opportunity for observing Jeanette than any one of the other girls.
Rarely ever with any degree of amiability, Jeanette and her own son, Jimmie, had spent a good many hours together. If they did not especially like each other, they had the same interests.
Jeanette was what old-fashioned persons once called a tomboy. She loved to ride and climb, fish and shoot, often excelling Jimmie, who was younger.
Jeanette had never been particularly sweet-tempered with Jimmie. Wanting her own way, she was apt to be difficult when opposed. From the first Jack had seen that Jeanette resented the boy's affection for his guardian, who was now his stepfather. More she resented her father's devotion to the only boy in the family.
If she could be jealous of this relation, how much greater her resentment against a stepmother, with such a strong claim upon her father.
There were breakers ahead.
Her husband had insisted that Eda, the youngest of the four girls, might be a trial. He never had understood her. A little more than a baby at her mother's death, she had been a shy, strange little person, thinking her own thoughts and living her own life with little regard to any one else.
Yet the thought of Eda did not trouble the new stepmother. Eda was young, was devoted to her older sister, and there was time enough to watch her character unfold.