Janet looked quickly from one to the other of her two elder girl cousins.
“I hope you won’t mind, Janet; Syd called you that the morning we heard you were coming, and it was so nice we couldn’t help adopting it,” said Gwen, her color mounting high. “He didn’t mean it unkindly; neither did we. It was only because you were coming ‘out of the West,’ you know. You don’t mind, do you?”
“No, I don’t mind. Why should I?” replied Janet, with an uneasy little laugh. “Young Lochinvar carried everything before him. It is rather complimentary. And you might as well call me Jan. They always do at home; Janet seems so long. Though, of course, if you like it better, it doesn’t matter.”
“No; Jan is cozy, and it suits you somehow,” said Gwen. “Don’t you want me to take you to your room? You must be tired, and feel all over cinders; I always do after I have been traveling.”
“Thanks. Is Aunt Tina away?” asked Janet timidly.
“Oh, mamma is out; she has no end of things to attend to; she isn’t at home much,” said Gladys. “We are all dreadfully busy; I never have a moment myself! Papa dines here—no, he doesn’t either! Papa and mamma dine out to-night. Well, that’s just the way. You’ll find New York rather different from a little town.”
“You’ll find New York very nice, and full of all sorts of things; it’s too big to be all one way,” said Gwen, filled with an unsisterly desire to shake Gladys’s high-and-mighty air out of her, as she saw the blank look of loneliness that came over the pretty, sensitive face before her. “Come up-stairs with me.—Gladys, you may tell the girls I won’t be around to-day.—Viva, you go with Hummie and Jerry.—Come on, Jan.”
Janet followed the one friendly person, except the big nurse Gwen called “Hummie,” whom she had met in this strange household. Gwen put her arm around the little brown figure, and Jan returned her pressure, yet she kept her eyes down on the way up-stairs, lest Gwen should see the tears, and she could not help feeling that she had passed through a sort of mental Russian bath, plunging from the warm affection of her own humbler home, and her loving anticipations of this new one, into the actual chill of her welcome to it.