Young as they were, the Garden girls were three distinct types, each beautiful. Mary least could claim actual beauty, perhaps, yet she was the loveliest of the three. Jane and Florimel were creatures for an artist to rave over; Mary was the type that men and women and angels love. When Florimel was a year old their mother had left them. She was English, an artist of some sort, they knew, and she had elected to respond to the call of her art, and had gone to England, leaving her children to the more than efficient guardianship of the Garden relatives, their legally appointed guardian, Mr. Austin Moulton, their father’s friend, and the devotion of Anne Kennington, the housekeeper, nurse—everything. It would have been hard to define Anne Kennington’s position in the Garden household, as it would have been hard to do justice to the way she filled it.
The girls had never thought much about their mother. The Gardens had been too well-bred to decry her to her children, but they had gathered the impression that she “did not amount to much,” a fearful indictment from a Garden! Mary had silently felt, in a hurt way, that she could never have left three little girls, no matter to whom, and she had not talked about their mother, even to her sisters. As time went on, without being told so, the Garden girls came to imagine that their mother was dead. This impression of one whom only Mary remembered vaguely could not sadden them. They were motherless; but, though they envied girls with loving fathers and mothers, they had a great deal. Each in her way, the three Garden girls were philosophers and did not imagine they were unhappy when they were not, since no life holds every form of good.
They had the solid, fine old house; Win Garden, Winchester, their father’s half-brother, only twenty-four years old, so big-brotherly that it was silly to call him uncle, and they never did; and the Garden. The square house of pressed brick stood in a garden, a great, old-fashioned garden, blooming around it, as the house bloomed amid it, with its rosebud girls. Sometimes the Garden girls thought the garden was their chief earthly good; certainly it was their chief joy. With it and one another little else was needed for companionship.
Now, in May, the lilacs blossomed and the irises were beginning, the herald shrubs were announcing themselves vanguards of the flower-beds. Many of these were filled with perennials, growing taller, more luxuriant each year, thanks to the care they got, chief of them all the tall hollyhocks which illumined the garden on all sides. The hollyhocks were so many and so magnificent that they gave their name to the Garden house. It was known as Hollyhock House to all the countryside. Other beds were left for seeds of swift-growing annuals; each Garden girl had two of these beds for her own planting and, when they flowered, one could have accurately named their owners. Even meteoric Florimel did not neglect her flowers.
Jane was singing in the sunshine as she cut sprays of white lilac. She looked like a sunray clad in flesh, with the sunshine on her magnificent hair, and her slender body pulsating with song, as a ray of light quivers in the air.
Mary looked up from her aster seedlings which she was thinning.
“You look as though you were going to fly away, Janie Goldilocks!” she cried, dropping back on her heels to regard Jane. Mary was always discovering her sister anew.
“Wish I could!” cried Jane. “Fly right up like a spark—my hair is red enough! And be a spark that wouldn’t cool in the air, but keep on and on! Over the Himalayas!” she added as an afterthought; that sounded magnificently distant, big and vague.
“Over the home layers would do for me—the chicken house!” laughed Mary.
“My voice goes up and up; it’s part of me, yet, when it is up, it is no longer a part of me,” said Jane. “I’m here, my feet on the ground, and I can send my voice skyward, and it is mine, me, and not me. It goes very, very high——”