But it had not proved so easy as she imagined it would be to slip out of her old life into the new. If she had left the Farley house preceded by a brass band and had marched round the monument and the length of Washington Street before taking her place in the market, her flight could hardly have attracted more attention.
The town buzzed. The newspapers neglected no phase of Nan’s affairs, nor did they overlook her as she stood behind the counter dispensing “Copeland Farm Products.” She was surprised and vexed by her sudden notoriety. A newspaper photographer snapped her, in her white sweater and blue-and-white tam o’shanter, passing eggs over the counter. The portrait bore the caption, “Miss Nancy Farley in a New Rôle,” and was supplemented by text adorned with such sub-headings as “Renounces her Fortune” and “Throws Away a Million Dollars.” To be thus heralded was preposterous; she had merely gone to work for reasons that were, in any view of the matter, her own private affair. But public sentiment was astonishingly friendly; even those who had looked askance at her high flights with the Kinney crowd said it was an outrage that Farley had failed to provide for her decently.
Fanny, thinking at first it was only a joke, a flare of temperament (references to her temperament had begun to pall upon Nan!), had welcomed Nan to her house and given her charge of the market-stand; but it was not without difficulty that she persuaded the girl to occupy her guest-room and share her meals.
“You’d better scold me when I make mistakes, for if I find I don’t suit I’ll fire myself,” Nan declared. “And if I have to leave you, I’ll go to clerking in a department store. I just mention this so you won’t be too polite. This isn’t any grandstand play, you see; I’m serious for the first time in my life!”
It was certain, at any rate, that Copeland Farm Products were sold with amazing ease. When it became known that Nan Farley had become Mrs. Copeland’s representative “on market,” there was lively competition for the privilege of purchasing those same “products.” Fanny complained ruefully that the jellies, jams, and pickles created by the young women in her industrial house would be exhausted before Christmas and that nothing would remain to sell but butter and eggs. Nan suggested orange marmalade and a cake-baking department to keep the girls at work during the winter, and on the off days she set herself to planning the preparation of these “specialties.” Mrs. Farley’s cooking lessons had not gone for naught; Nan could bake a cake in which there was no trace of “sadness,” and after some experiments with jumbles and sand-tarts she sold her first output in an hour and opened a waiting list.
Mrs. Copeland told Eaton at the end of the second week that she had never known the real Nan till now. There was no questioning the girl’s sincerity; she had cut loose from her old life, relinquished all hope of participating in Farley’s fortune, and addressed herself zealously to the business of supporting herself. She became immediately the idol of the half-dozen young women in the old farmhouse, who thought her an immensely “romantic” figure and marveled at her industry and resourcefulness.
“Splendid! Give her all the room she wants,” Eaton urged Mrs. Copeland. “She’s only finding herself; we’ll have the Nan she was meant to be the first thing we know.”
“I didn’t know all these nice church-going people would come to condole with me, or I’d have left town,” Nan confided to Fanny. “These women who wouldn’t let their daughters associate with me a year ago can’t buy enough eggs now to show how much they sympathize with me. If they don’t keep away, I’m going to raise the price of their eggs, and that will break their hearts—and the eggs! But do you know,” she went on gravely, “I’ve never been so happy in my life as I am now! And I wouldn’t have anybody think it was out of pique, or with any unkind feeling toward papa,”—tears shone in her eyes as the word slipped from her tongue,—“but I tell you nobody ever could have made a nice, polite girl out of me. I was bound to get into scrapes as long as I hadn’t anything really to do but fill in time between manicuring and hair-washing dates. There’s a whole lot in that old saying about making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear: it can’t be did!”
“If you talk that way,” Fanny laughed, “I shall turn you out of my house. I don’t want you to think I approve of what you’re doing. I’m letting you do it because I’m scared not to!”
“You’d better be—for if you hadn’t taken me in, I should have gone on the stage,—honestly, I should,—in vaudeville, most likely, doing monologues right between the jugglers and the trained seals.”...