And the handsome Miss Morton added, “My goodness, 153Emma Morton, if I didn’t have anything to do but draw forty dollars every month for yanking a lot of little kids around and teaching them the multiplication tables, I wouldn’t say much. Why, we’ve come through algebra into geometry and half way through Cicero, while you’ve been fussing with that old principal–and Mrs. Herdicker’s got a new trimmer, and we girls down at the shop have to put up with her didoes. Talk of trouble, gee!”
“Martha, you make me weary,” said the youngest Miss Morton, eating an apple. “If you’d had scarlet fever and measles the same year, and your old dress just turned and your same old hat, you’d have something to talk about.”
“Well,” remarked His Honor the Mayor to Henry Fenn and Morty Sands as they sat in the Amen Corner New Year’s eve, looking at the backs of a shelf of late books and viewing several shelves of standard sets with highly gilded backs, “it’s more’n a year since election–and well, say–I’ve got all my election bets paid now and am out of debt again, and the book store’s gradually coming along. By next year this time I expect to put four more shelves of copyrighted books in and cut down the paper backs to a stack on the counter. But old Lady Nicotine is still the patron of the fine arts–say, if it wasn’t for the ’baccy little Georgie would be so far behind with his rent that he would knock off a year and start over.”
Young Mr. Sands rolled a cigarette and lighted it and said: “It’s a whole year–and Pop’s gone a long time without a wife; it’ll be two years next March since the last one went over the hill who was brought out to make a home for little Morty, and I saw Dad peeking out of the hack window as we were standing waiting for the hearse, and wondered which one of the old girls present he’d pick on. But,” mused Morty, “I guess it’s Anne’s eyes. Every time he edges around to the subject of our need of a mother, Anne turns her eyes on him and he changes the subject.” Morty laughed quietly and added: “When Anne gets out of her ‘teens she’ll put father in a monastery!”
“Honeymoon’s kind of waning–eh, Henry?” asked Judge Van Dorn, who dropped in for a magazine and heard 154the conversation about the passing of the year. He added: “I see you’ve been coming down here pretty regularly for three or four months!” Henry looked up sadly and shook his head. “You can’t break the habit of a dozen years. And I got to coming here back in the days when George ran a pool and billiard hall, and I suppose I’ll come until I die, and then George will bring his wheezy old quartette around and sing over me, and probably act as pall-bearer too–if he doesn’t read the burial service of the lodge in addition.”
“Well, a year’s a year,” said the suave Judge Van Dorn. “A year ago you boys were smoking on me as the new judge of this judicial district. All hail Thane of Cawdor–” He smiled his princely smile, taking every one in with his frank, bold eyes, and waved himself into the blustery night. There he met Mr. Calvin, who, owing to a turn matters had taken at home, was just beginning another long period of exile from the hearthstone. He walked the night like a ghost, silent and grim. His thin little neck, furrowed behind by the sunken road between his arteries, was adorned by two tufts of straggling hair, and as his overcoat collar was rolled and wrinkled, he had an appearance of extreme neglect and dejection. “Did you realize that it’s over a year since election?” said Van Dorn. “We might as well begin looking out for next year, Joe,” he added, “if you’ve got nothing better to do. I wish you’d go down the row to-night and see the boys and tell them I want to talk to them in the next ten days or so; a man never can be too early in these things; and say–if you happen in the Company store down there and see Violet Mauling, slip her a ten and charge it to me on the books; I wonder how she’s doing–I haven’t heard of her for three months. Nice girl, Violet.”
And Mrs. Herdicker hadn’t heard of Miss Mauling for some time, and sitting in her little office back of the millinery store, sorting over her old bills, she came to a bill badly dog-eared with Miss Mauling’s name on it. The bill called for something like $75 and the last payment on it had been made nearly half a year ago. So she looked at that bill and added ten dollars to Mrs. Van Dorn’s bill for the last hat she bought, and did what she could to resign herself to the 155injustices of a cruel world. But it had been a good year for Mrs. Herdicker. New wells in new districts had come gushing gas and oil into Harvey in great geysers and the work on the new smelter was progressing, and the men in the mines had been kept steadily at work; for Harvey coal was the best in the Missouri Valley. So the ladies who are no better than they should be and the ladies who are much better than they should be, and the ladies who will stand for a turned ribbon, and a revived feather, and are just about what they may be expected to be, all came in and spent their money like the princesses that they were. And Mrs. Herdicker figured in going over her stock just which hat she could sell to Mrs. Nesbit as a model hat from the Paris exhibit at the World’s Fair, and which one she could put on Mrs. Fenn as a New York sample, and as she built her castles the loss of the $75 to Miss Mauling had its compensating returns, and she smiled and thought that just a year ago she had offered that same World’s Fair Model to the wife of the newly elected State Senator and she must put on a new bunch of flowers and bend down the brim.
The Dexters were sitting by the stove in the living-room with Amos Adams; they had come down to the lonely little home to prepare a good dinner for the men. “A year ago to-day,” said the minister to the group as he put down the newspaper, “Kenyon got his new fiddle.”
“The year has brought me something–I tell you,” Jasper said. “I’ve bought a horse with my money I earned as page in the State Senate and I’ve got a milk route, and have all the milk in the neighborhood to distribute. That’s what the year has done for me.”
“Well,” reflected the minister, “we’ve got the mission church in South Harvey on a paying basis, and the pipe organ in the home church paid for–that’s some comfort. And they do say,” his eyes twinkled as he looked at his wife, “that the committee is about to settle all the choir troubles. That’s pretty good for a year.”