“You can tell him anything you please,” said Gladys furiously, “but I won’t have anything to do with Janet, and nobody can make me! You can’t say I treat her badly if I let her entirely alone!”
So Gladys withdrew herself from her sister’s society, since it involved Jan’s, and was more than ever with her objectionable friends, by way of defying Gwen and proving her independence; though the only thing she succeeded in proving thoroughly was proved to herself, and that was that she was very miserable and ashamed of herself.
“I am driving Gladys away,” said Jan forlornly to Gwen one day. “You are never together, and it’s all my fault. I sometimes wish I had never come to New York.”
“Don’t worry, Jan. Gladys and I were never friends,” said Gwen lightly. Then seeing Jan’s shocked expression, she added: “Not that we were enemies, you know. What I mean is we never were chums. We always liked different things and people. It might as well be you we differ about as anything else. It isn’t you who have done it.”
“But she is with the Hammonds all the time—more than when I first came, and you never liked that,” objected Jan.
“Probably it is all for the best. I should think that would be the best way to cure her of liking them,” laughed Gwen. “Don’t worry, Jan. You can’t make everybody alike.”
With which bit of philosophy Jan had to try to satisfy herself.
The kitten she had rescued on her return from the party was showing gratifying results of her care. After he had had the mud sponged from his fur—a task performed by Gwen, since Jan was unable to do it—he had displayed a pretty coat of black stripes on a brownish ground, with snowy breast and paws, and a nice face, which Jan convulsed Gwen and Jack by pronouncing “grave and sweet in expression,” though there was no denying that this was true when she had pointed out the fact.
He had been some one’s pet, for his manners were quite elegant, and he had been taught to jump through hands, and to eat like a Turveydrop of deportment. But Jan did not call him Turveydrop, as Gwen wanted her to. She named him Tommy Traddles, after the cheerful youth of whom she was very fond, and he became the greatest addition to the little exile’s comfort. Tommy Traddles required convincing that each other member of the family individually meant well by him, for he had been so frightened during his days of wandering and hardship that he distrusted every one, but Jan he loved from the first. He had a shocking cough and bad indigestion from exposure and lack of food, but Jan cured the one with cod-liver oil and the other by careful feeding, and Tommy Traddles came out as good as new. It seemed to Jan, when he sat purring in her sunny chamber window, with the broad middle stripe of his back getting more glossy before her eyes, that she had not had a moment of home feeling until her dear cat came.
One day when it had been raining heavily, and a cold had kept Jack at home from school, Jan sat in Gwen’s room listening to the first chapters—three were now written—of the novel which she, quite as implicitly as Gwen, believed that North & Co would jump at the chance to publish as soon as Cena North laid it before her father.