Sara, on her knees beside the little, rosy, kindly lady, pulled her cap straight, and scolded her for making her forefinger rough with so much sewing.
“You are always making petticoats for poor people,” she said severely, “instead of talking to me about my winter clothes. I want a new dinner dress, ma’am, and you’ve got to buy it. I’ve used up all my allowance, and borrowed from father on the next quarter; so please help the deserving poor of your own household. Charity begins at home, let me tell you! Who is to have this petticoat?—while your own poor child is in want of a satin gown!”
“Well,” Mrs. Wharton said, with some confusion, “the fact is, Nellie looks so sickly I am afraid she is not warmly enough clad”—
Sara shrieked with laughter. “Consistency, thy name is Mother,” she cried; and began to pour out her plans for Nellie, which Mrs. Wharton amended several times, objecting to Sara’s assertion that Nellie should repay the money expended for her tuition at the commercial college.
“The poor thing will have so little money, anyhow,” she entreated. But Sara held to her theory.
“We’ll make it up in other ways,—petticoats, and things, but she must feel it a loan,” she said.
However, Miss Wharton’s theories were far too fine for the material with which she worked. When the three terms at the commercial college were over, Nellie was languidly grateful, but she doubted whether she should like bookkeeping; she was, however, willing to “give it a trial;” so Sara found a place in a shop for her, and, as the proprietor (another friend and dependent) could not pay the full wages, made up the sum herself. But it never occurred to Nellie to begin to pay her debt; and Sara, fearful of antagonizing the child, cast her theory to the winds, and did not suggest it.
So the first year passed. The anxious, courageous, artificial fight never flagged; and Nellie, for twelve months, was “straight.” There had been great expenditure of time and strength and money to save the little creature; and in a purely negative way the effort had been successful. Nellie was “straight.”
Yet Sara Wharton was sometimes dreadfully discouraged; she could not see a single large or noble trait in the girl, although it was her sweet and loving theory to believe in what she did not see.
“Goodness is there, somewhere!” she used to say to herself, with a beautiful and courageous belief which was part of her own character; and then she fell back on what she had called “the greatest thing in the world:” “Goodness is there, and I’ve got to love it out!” She took Nellie’s latent goodness for granted, especially in her effort to overcome the child’s enveloping selfishness. She was constantly trying to make her realize the happiness of sacrifice.