Dan’s other two particular pests and Lorraine’s friends were Josie Donaldson and Hazel Mitchell. Josie Donaldson’s father was next to Dan the richest man in the village and Josie the natural and fearful result of being the only child of such a plutocrat.
She was a precocious young person with the boast that she could do anything she set out to do, if she could do it her way, backed up by admiring throngs of relatives. She had framed the first dollar bill she ever earned (?) for some minor service in her father’s hardware store, had worn the patience of the newspaper editors to a thread by asking for a job as a reporter only to take a few days off, after she was hired, to give a party or write a new poem. Dan called her poems “Josie’s dope,” as they appeared from time to time in a box border with the heading, “Birge’s Corners’ Muse.”
There were many familiar phrases in these poems which increased in number as time went on, but being Josie Donaldson’s, they were passed without question and editor after editor would warn his new and optimistic successor, “When that Donaldson girl comes in here for a job just tie the can on from the start. It is cheap at half the price to be rid of her. You’ll know her. She’s fat and dresses like a circus rider, carries a bolt of baby ribbon around so as to tie up any poems she may happen to write en route. She’ll cry if you correct her spelling and she was never known to get any one’s initials right in her life, not even her own family’s. Fudge ought to be her life work. She’s made love to every fellow in the burg and, when they escape, she wants to start a backbiting contest in the paper. Her pa and ma think Josie is one, two, three, all right, and they have enlarged photographs of her at every stage—from writhing on the fur rug clad in a smile to her graduating dress clasping the valedictory essay. She writes her father’s ads and I’m darned if I can tell whether he wants to run a special sale of sprinkling cans at seventy-nine cents per or whether hell’s broken loose in Hoboken! Don’t let her get across—not even for a week or you’ll have galloping brain fever.”
Josie also attached herself to Lorraine, who read her poems and made her fudge galore. She told Lorraine her troubles, that a girl with brains, and particularly a girl with literary ability, was never popular with boys; they wanted silly, little wasp-waisted dolls and she was just too hurt for words—so there.
Lorraine was also sorry for Josie and she let her ravage her sugar barrel and pile on to her best chaise longue to lie and pout and eat candy, trying to find a new word to rhyme with “death.”
The other offender was Dan’s own stenographer, Hazel Mitchell. Dan, who looked upon the world with a larger vision than did most of the Corners, had a contempt and lack of interest in Lorraine’s “grafters.” Had he loved Lorraine as he had loved Thurley there would have been many a battle on the subject until he had shown Lorraine the broader vision and comprehension. As it was, he was content to let well enough alone, unless he was called upon to entertain the “grafters” and endure their chatter.
Hazel Mitchell was a slender, wan-eyed girl—“moon face” was Dan’s considerate name for her. She was, so he said, eternally recombing her hair when he wanted to give some dictation and always feeling whether or not her waist and skirt were properly interlocked, or running off to visit the male clerk in the men’s furnishings or “just slipping” up to Owen Pringle’s shoppe to try on a new hat!
Hazel operated her actions on the theory that “pity is akin to love” and if she could make every one sufficiently sorry for her the day was won. This she managed to do with less consideration for the truth and the common sense of her audience than one might have suspected.
“Oh, I never listen to her yarns,” Dan told Lorraine, when Lorraine asked if he did not feel sorry for Hazel who had a brutal, drunken father and whose mother with eight children younger than Hazel never had a kind word for the girl, but expected her to come right straight home from work and start tending the babies. “If there was any one else in this town I could hire, I’d do it without hesitation. But if I let her go, Josie Donaldson would want the place or else Cora Spooner, and Hazel is a mild sort of fool. How can she cry all the time and not get granulated lids?” he ended irritably. “She blots her dictation pad for fair.”
“She says they have nothing elevating in their home and she craves better things,” repeated little Lorraine.