“She evidently cares nothing for us,” Anna thought, and she was beginning to feel angry and resentful, when Mrs. Jerry looked in, and seeing Mrs. Ferguson exclaimed:
“Just the one I wanted. I’m making some currant jam, and wish you’d come to the kitchen a minute.”
Mrs. Ferguson went out at once, and, left to themselves, the two girls began to talk, Reinette asking numberless questions by the way of drawing her cousin out and judging what she was. It did not take long for her to learn that Anna had been for three quarters to a young ladies’ seminary in Worcester, that she had studied algebra, geometry, astronomy, chemistry, physiology, botany, rhetoric, zoology, English literature, German and French; she had dabbled a little in water-colors, had taken lessons on the piano, and sometimes played the melodeon in Sunday school.
“Dear me,” said Reinette, drawing a long breath, “how learned you must be. I have never studied half those things. I hate mathematics, and rhetoric, and geology, and literature, and you are posted in them all. But tell me, now you are through school, what do you do? Merrivale is a small place; there cannot be much to occupy one outside. What do you do all day, when it rains, for instance, and you can’t go out? and when you first came from school; time must have hung heavily then.”
Reinette had no particular object in asking so many questions; she only wished to make talk, and she had no suspicion of the effect her words had upon Anna, who turned scarlet, and hesitated a moment; then, thinking to herself, “It don’t matter; I may as well spit it out,” she said:
“Reinette, you will know some time how I live, and so I’ll tell you myself, and let you judge whether my life is a happy one. You know of course that we are poor. I don’t mean that we have not enough to eat and wear, but we work for a living, and that in America makes quite as much difference as it does in Europe. Father keeps a small grocery and mother is a dressmaker and, talk as you please of the nobility of labor, and that ‘a man’s a man for a’ that,’ the man must have money and the woman, too; and there are lots of girls in town no better than I am, with not half as good an education, who look down upon me because my mother makes their dresses, and I help her sometimes. You ask what I did when I first came from school. I’ll tell you. Mother was very busy, for there was a grand wedding in progress to which I was not bidden, but I had to work on the dresses, and take some of them home, and when I rang the front door-bell at Sue Granger’s, I was told by an impudent house-maid to step round to the side door as her lady had visitors in the parlor, and it was no place to receive parcels. I tell you I was mad, and I’ve never carried a budget since, and never will; and I shall be so glad if we ever get out of the business, for I hate it, and I am just as good as Sue Granger, whose mother they say once worked in a cotton mill. Thank goodness, I am not as low as that. There’s good blood in my veins, too, if I am poor. The Rices (mother was a Rice) are highly connected with some of the best families in the State. Governor Rice is a distant relative of mine, and the Fergusons are well enough.”
Here Anna paused to take breath, and Reinette, who had listened to her wonderingly, said:
“And do your cousins, Ethel and Grace, share your opinions?”
“Of course not. Why should they? Aren’t they big bugs, Colonel Rossiter’s daughters? Don’t they go to Saratoga, and Newport, and Florida, and the sea-side, and have a maid, and drive their carriage, and live in a big house? Such people can never understand why girls like me feel as I do. Ethel and Grace laugh at me, and say I am just as good as they are; and so I am, though the world don’t think so. Their mother used to stitch shoes for the shop when a girl, and sell gingerbread across the counter sometimes, just as your mother did. You know, perhaps, that Grandma Ferguson kept a kind of baker’s shop.”
Reinette flushed to the roots of her hair as she replied;