Interrupted

by Pansy

In the sitting-room opposite stood Claire's younger sister, Dora Benedict. She had just come in from the outer world, and with part of her wraps still gathered about her, stood watching the falling snow, and listening to the voices in the back parlor. At this point she spoke:

"Mamma, just hear the girls! They are heaping up the work on Claire, giving her the planning and the collecting and the drilling, and the greater portion of the programme to attend to, and she calmly agrees to do it all."

"Your sister has a great amount of executive ability, my dear, and is always to be depended on. Such people are sure to have plenty of burdens to carry."

Mrs. Benedict said this in a gently modulated, satisfied voice, and leaned back in her easy chair and smiled as she spoke. She delayed a stitch in her crimson tidy, while she listened a moment to the sound of Claire's voice, calmly and assuringly shouldering the burdens of work; promising here, offering there, until the listeners in the sitting-room were prepared to sympathize with the words spoken in the parlor in a relieved tone of voice:

"I declare, Claire Benedict, you are a host in yourself! What we should do without you is more than I can imagine."

"I should think as much!" This from the girl in the brown-plumed hat, who listened in the next room. "You couldn't do without her! that is just all there would be about it! Two thirds of your nice plans, for which you get so much credit, would fall through. Mamma, do you think Claire ought to attempt so much?"

"Well, I don't know," responded the gentle-faced woman thus appealed to, pausing again in her fancy work to consider the question. "Claire has remarkable talent, you know, in all these directions. She is a born organizer and leader, and the girls are willing to follow her lead. I don't know but she works too hard. It is difficult to avoid that, with so many people depending on her I don't myself see how they would manage without her. You know Doctor Ellis feels much the same. He was telling your father, only last night, that there was not another young lady in the church on whom he could depend as he did on her. Your father was amused at his earnestness. He said he should almost feel like giving up his pastorate here, if he should lose her. Claire is certainly a power in the church, and the society generally. I should feel sorry for them if they were to lose her."

The mother spoke this sentence quietly, with the unruffled look of peace and satisfaction on her face. No foreboding of loss came to her. She thought, it is true, of the barely possible time when her eldest daughter might go out from this home into some other, and have other cares and responsibilities, but the day seemed very remote. Claire was young, and was absorbed in her church and home work.

Apparently, even the suggestion of another home had not come to her. It might never come. She might live always in the dear home nest, sheltered, and sheltering, in her turn, others less favored. Or in the event of a change, some time in the future, it might be, possibly, just from one street in the same city to another, and much of the old life go on still; and in any event the mother could say "their loss," not mine; for the sense of possible separation had not come near enough to shadow the mother's heart as yet; she lived in the dreamland of belief that a married daughter would be as near to the mother and the home as an unmarried one. Therefore her face was placid, and she sewed her crimson threads and talked placidly of what might have been, but was not; the future looked secure and smiling.

"You see," she continued to the young and but half-satisfied daughter, "it is an unusual combination of things that makes your sister so important to this society. There are not many girls in it who have wealth and leisure, and the peculiar talents required for leadership. Run over the list in your mind, and you will notice that those who have plenty of time would not know what to do with it unless Claire were here to tell them, and those who have plenty of money would fritter it all away, without her to guide, and set a grand example for them."