“Where does that girl get her vim and go ahead?” the neighbors used to say, remembering her mother’s frail constitution and her indolent and easy-going father.
Alice knew all about him. She had overheard a farmhand telling another of his laziness, his selfishness and love of ease and pride, which sometimes rebelled against his plain surroundings and the people of the town, the mill-hands, the shoemakers and machinists who constituted a large proportion of the inhabitants of Rocky Point.
“I know now where I got that little mean thread in my nature. I am naturally lazy, and selfish, and proud, and sometimes grind my teeth hard at what seems common and vulgar. But I’ll kill it dead,” she said, with a stamp of her foot. “I’ll do what my hands find to do without shrinking, and not mind the rough men whom Uncle Ephraim has on his farm.”
On two or three occasions she had spent a month in New York in Mrs. Tracy’s elegant house, and although she did not go a great deal into society, she went enough to get a taste for something different from her life at home. But she resolutely set her face against any repinings which might show on the surface, and was as bright and cheerful and sunny as if the rambling old farmhouse, with its low ceilings, its square beams in the corners of the rooms, and its iron door latches were a palatial residence and she the queen; and, in a way, she was queen of the place, for the old couple loved her as if she had been their own child. Nothing was too good for her, and no sacrifice they could make too great if it made her happier. In return for this she lavished upon them all the love of her ardent nature, and gave to them a helpfulness and thoughtfulness beyond her years.
Just before going to Europe Helen spent a week at the farmhouse, declaring herself ennuied to death with the dulness.
“I like being with you, of course,” she said to Alice. “You rest me and bring out the best there is in me, and when I see you washing those dreadful dinner dishes and skimming the milk and pouring tea and coffee for those sweaty men who come to the table in their shirt sleeves, I hate myself for the useless piece of pottery I am, and feel tempted to try the dairy maid business like you. If I had a little chalet and a petit Trianon like Marie Antoinette I’d do it. Truly, Alice, I don’t see how you endure it as you do, with nothing livelier to go to than a church social, where they play kissing games, but won’t let you dance, because it is wicked, and not a single man to flirt with. I am positively getting rusty for some male to wink at!”
Alice laughed and replied, “I believe you’d flirt with the undertaker if you could get your eyes on him. Why, you have winked at every sweaty man on the farm, and there isn’t one of them who doesn’t brighten up the minute you appear in your stunning gowns, with your cheery good morning. There are men enough to flirt with, but not exactly your kind.”
“Nor yours, either,” Helen rejoined. “Honestly, how are you ever to be married, unless I send you some of my cast-offs?”
“Which one?” Alice asked, and Helen replied, “I really don’t know, there’s ——,” so and so, repeating their names; “but, I dare say, whichever one I made over to you I should want back again. I wrote you from Saratoga about Craig Mason, who didn’t care to call upon me. Do you know, I’m dying to see him. Something tells me you would suit him to a dot, but it can’t be till I’ve met him in fair conflict and been defeated.”
This conversation took place the day before Helen left Rocky Point, and a week later she sailed for Europe, leaving Alice very lonely with the ocean between her and the cousin to whom she was greatly attached. The next April she was offered the spring term in the district school at three dollars a week and board herself. It was something to do,—something to earn,—and she took the school, and made believe she liked it, although Helen herself could scarcely have rebelled more against it than she did, mentally, or have been more relieved than she was when the last day came and she was released from the daily routine which had been so irksome to her. She was to take it up again in the autumn, it was true, but for ten weeks she was free to do what she liked. Skimming the milk and washing the dreadful dinner dishes and pouring coffee for sweaty men she preferred to school teaching, if it were not that the latter brought her money of her own. “Thirty-six dollars,” she repeated, as she fanned herself with the cover of a spelling book. “What shall I do with it all? Ten shall go to Aunt Mary; five to Uncle Ephraim, and I really think I need ten more for gloves and boots and things. Twenty-five dollars in all—oh my!” and she stopped, appalled at the thought that there were only eleven dollars left for the trip to Cooperstown, she was so anxious to take. It couldn’t be done. She must stay at home, as she had the previous summer, and she wanted so much to get in touch with the world as she had known it in Albany, and the glimpses she had had of it in New York, if it were only for a week. It seemed hard, and for a moment her bright spirits were clouded, and there were tears in her eyes, which she wiped away quickly as she heard a step and a whistle by the door. It was a young lad, one of her scholars, who came in without at first seeing her. Then, with a start, he said, “Oh, Miss Tracy, you here? I left my jography and come in to get it. I was goin’ out to your house. I’ve been to the office and they gin me a letter for you, ’cause it says on it ‘In Haste.’ Here ’tis.”