Six Girls and the Tea Room

by Marion Ames Taggart

But Mrs. Scollard hesitated. The advantages to her little brood were so great in this arrangement, the consequences of the experiment's ending badly, if thus it should end, would be so tragic, that she dared not agree to the tempting proposal until she had weighed it long and carefully.

While it pended, the unsettled feeling of spring made the Patty-Pans its headquarters.

"I never felt so queer and upset in all my life!" Happie declared to Gretta. "I feel as though I were a thin muslin gown hung out in a very high wind by only one clothes pin—I can't tell what minute, nor where I'm going to drop."

Gretta laughed. "As long as you see nothing but soft grass all around, it doesn't matter much," she said.

There was no little excitement in the flat across the hall during these days of untimely warmth. The Gordons had been to see Mrs. Jones-Dexter by special invitation. Mrs. Gordon dreaded going on one ground, and remembered the visit painfully on another. It had seemed formidable to call on an aunt whom she had never known except by forbidding repute, but it was almost worse to find that stern person crushed, pathetically eager to make amends for the bitterness she had sown and fostered, and to do for Ralph all that lay in her power. The boy stood to her less as her grandnephew than as the legacy of little Serena, the "kind big boy" in whose strong arms her frail life had ended.

Another visit had followed the first one, in which Mrs. Gordon and her elder boy were bidden to meet Mrs. Jones-Dexter's lawyers, to receive the principal which Mrs. Jones-Dexter had set aside for Serena's maintenance. The interest of this money would enable Ralph to go through college without a care as to his expenses, and next year he would enter Columbia.

Ralph had been ready to face the self-denials, the effort of working his way through the four years that lay ahead of him, but it was not a little thing suddenly to be freed from this necessity. It meant a great deal to the mother and to both boys, and the flat across from the Patty-Pans was full of grateful excitement as the March days went by in which these important happenings were perfecting.

Easter fell on an early date that year, and little Mrs. Stewart was busy preparing for her spring exhibition. More than the languor of spring was in the delicate little woman's eye and carriage. Lassitude that was rather mental than bodily weariness was betrayed by her every motion. She came oftener into the tea room in the morning and Margery and she became great friends. The young girl's confident happiness drew the older woman to her, and she won Margery to talk of her hopes and plans. It was not hard for Margery to see that she listened to them much as one reads and re-reads a poem that brings the tears which comfort in their shedding.

Mrs. Stewart did not return Margery's confidences on her own young romance by the story of her unhappy life, nor did she precisely withhold such confidence. By a word here and there the girls learned that the little dancing mistress with the lovely face and gracious manners, was one of those pathetic creatures, a lady cut off from her proper setting in life, deprived of the support that should have been hers and without which she was peculiarly unfitted to exist. Physically and instinctively Mrs. Stewart was ill-adapted to combat the world. Margery knew without being told in so many words, that the little dancing mistress' husband had been a German, an extraordinary musician who had given up, for his art's sake, his family, which was one among the lesser nobility of the Fatherland. But she knew also that he had selfishly sacrificed to his music the frail American wife he had married after coming to the United States, and that in some manner that Margery did not understand, he had neglected her, been cruel to her, and that his one child had died because the heart-broken mother could not give him what he required.