“Suppose we can’t keep her, Janie? If she’s unhappy we shall not want to keep her,” Mary sighed, dropping a spoonful of mayonnaise on to the lettuce as if she said: “Ashes to ashes.”
“I don’t think she’s so heartless, Mary,” said Jane, intending to banish Mary’s anxiety by a shock, and certainly succeeding in shocking her.
“Heartless! Oh, Jane!” Mary cried.
“What else would it be, if she didn’t care enough about her own children to stay with them, when they were doing their best, too?” maintained Jane.
“If we had been her own children all along it would be different,” Mary suggested. “I’m afraid such young girls as we can’t make her happy. There’s so much we have to replace.”
“I think we’re pretty nice,” said Jane honestly. “Lots of people like girls young; the younger the better. Some people prefer babies, even. Of course we are not companionable, like the people she’s been with, nor entertaining that way, but I’d suppose we were interesting in another way. Besides, we’re hers! There isn’t any sense in trying to feel as if we were just little sugar gingerbread figures! We think Florimel is so pretty we can’t do a thing, sometimes, but watch her. And you like me, and laugh at my nonsense. And I know you’re—Mary! Often I want to fly off and do things and see things myself, but I know all the time I’d fly back to you fast enough! I always know that and say that, even when I’m craziest. I guess nobody could have you around, Mary Garden, and feel they had a right to you, and give you up, my darling! So what’s the use of worrying too much about our cute little toy mother? She’ll root in the garden!”
“You’re a queer mixture, my Janie,” said Mary, looking at Jane with laughter and gratitude in her eyes. “Nobody would be expected to love us as we love each other, you and I! Not that I mean that is part of the queer mixture. But you’re as full of impossible schemes, and as flighty as the wind, yet you’re really so sensible! More so than I am and I seem——”
“The church steeple and I the weathercock!” cried Jane. “So you are, so I am. But you’re afraid of hurting somebody’s feelings, if you go to bed and think the truth in the dark, where nobody can see you, and when everybody thinks you’re asleep! I’m not! I think it’s right to see straight—then you’re pretty sure to stand by people, because you haven’t anything to change your mind about. That cute little mother ought to be crazy over such a girl as you are, Mary, and such a pretty, clever thing as Mel——”
“And such a flame-warm, and flame-clever, and flame-beautiful daughter as——”
“Get the fire extinguisher, Molly!” Jane interrupted. “You see, after all, you do know that our cunning linnet ought to enjoy her young birds in this garden! Though I’m sorrier than you can be for her to have lost her voice. Somehow, I believe I know better than you do what that is to her. Molly, did you ever think of it? You’re the reliable, house-motherly little soul, and I’m the flighty Garden, yet I’m older than you are, though I’m not sixteen, and you’re trotting right up to your eighteenth bend in the road?”