Girl I call her, but she had passed the days of her girlhood. Few knew it; it was wonderful how young and fresh her heart had kept. That being the case, of course her face had taken the same impress. It was hard for Ruth Erskine to realize that her friend Marion was really thirteen years older than herself. There were times when Marion herself felt younger than Ruth did.
But the years were there, and in her times of depression, Marion realized it. So many of them recorded, and yet no friends to whom she had a right, feeling sure that nothing in human experience this side of death would be likely to come in and take her away from them. The very supper-table at that boarding-house was sufficient to add to her sense of desolation.
It is a pitiful fact that we are such dependent creatures that even the crooked laying of a cloth, and the coffee-stains and milk-stains and gravy-stains thereon, can add to our sense of friendlessness. Then, what is there particularly consoling or cheering in a cup of weak tea and a bit of bread a trifle sour, spread over by butter more than a trifle strong; even though it is helped down by some very dry bits of chipped beef? This was Marion's supper.
The boarders were, some of them, cross, some of them simply silent and hurried, all of them damp, for they were every one workers out in the damp, dreary world; the most of them, in fact, I may say all of them, were very tired; yet many of them had work to do that very evening. Marion ate her supper in silence, too; at least she bit at her bread and tried to swallow her simpering tea.
When her heart was bright and her plans for the evening definite and satisfactory, she could manage the sour bread and strong butter even, with something like a relish, but there was no use in trying them to-night. She even tormented herself with the planning of a dainty supper, accompanied by exquisite table arrangements such as she would manage for a sister, say, if she had one—a sister who had been in school all day and was wet and hungry and tired, if she had the room, and the table, and the china, and the materials out of which to construct the supper. She was reasonable enough to see that there were many ifs in the way, but the picture did not make the present supper relish.
She struggled to rally her weary powers. She asked the clerk next her if it had been a busy day, and she told the sewing-girl at her left about a lovely bouquet of flowers that one of the girls brought to school, and that she had meant to bring home to her, if it was presented. To be sure it was not. But the intention was the same, and the heart of the sewing-girl was cheered.
Finally Marion gave over trying to swallow the supper, and assuring herself with the determination to go early to bed, and so escape faintness, she went up three flights of stairs to her room.
"When I am rich and a woman of leisure, I will build a house that shall have pleasant rooms and good bread and butter, and I will board school-teachers and sewing-girls and clerks for a song." This she said aloud.
Then she set about making a bit of blaze, or a great deal of smoke in the little imp of a stove. The stove was small and cracked and rusty, and could smoke like a furnace. What a contrast to the glowing coal-grate where Flossy at this hour toasted her pretty cheeks. Yet Marion, in her way, was less dismal than Flossy in hers.
It was not in Marion's nature to shed any tears; instead, she hummed a few notes of a glorious old tune triumphant in every note, trying this to rob herself of gloom and cheat herself into the belief that she was not very lonely, and that her life did not stretch out before her as a desolate thing. She did not mean to give herself up to glooming, though she did hover over the little stove and lean her cheek on her hand and look at nothing in particular for a few minutes. What she said when she rallied from the silence was simply: