“Florimel, what can you be talking about?” cried Mary. “Who are all these people? Examined by whom, and for what?”
“Oh, I’ll tell you, Mary,” Jane took up the theme impatiently. “Florimel is so silly! Of course it was funny, only how was I to know Miss Aldine was Mrs. Mivle and that what the Post said wasn’t so?” Jane laughed at herself, her sense of humour too strong to allow her to feel annoyed with Florimel long.
“Positively I believe you’ve both gone crazy together, over night!” cried Mary. “Miss Aldine is Mrs. Mivle, you say? And Florimel is talking of ‘Petey Mivle’—like a schoolmate—and the Post—— Hurry the story!”
“Sit down, Mary, and I’ll harrow your young blood!” declared Jane, and forthwith gave her sister an account of her resolution to seek a great actress to ask advice on her career, and of the visit to the Waldorf. Jane told her story so well that Mary and Florimel and Anne, who had come in to find out what her younger charges had been doing, were all three in convulsions. It might have warranted any one in thinking that Jane was right in considering the stage her vocation.
“Oh, me, oh, me!” sighed Mary, emerging from the sofa pillows into which she had helplessly fallen. “You do such mad things, Janie! And you are so wilful! You ought not to have started off alone on such an errand, to people you knew absolutely nothing about! Florimel is a headstrong child, but even she is more prudent. They must be kind people, if they are untidy, and flashy, and trashy! I’m glad they were so nice to you. Please, Jane, settle down and stop being restless-minded!”
“Can’t do it,” said Jane promptly. “I suppose there’s fire inside my head and the roots of my hair are in it. That’s why I’m always crackling off in explosions, and why my hair is red.”
“And I suppose we want you to be just what you are, if we tell the truth,” added Mary as she went out of the room. She could not bear to seem to criticise Jane or Florimel, being sensitively alive to a dread of hurting them, and conscious of the slight difference in their ages.
Florimel ran after Mary, and Anne Kennington turned to Jane.
“What put the stage into your head, Jane?” she asked. “Were you thinking of your mother? You don’t look like her, but you are more like her, in some ways, than either of the others.”
“My mother?” echoed Jane. “Mercy, no, Anne! Why should I?”