"I will not!" said Jane, crisply. "Bathtubs and linoleum, indeed! Wring them out of your Board! I shall give you a Sleepy Hollow couch with bide-a-wee cushions, and deep, cuddly armchairs and a lamp or two with shades as mellow as autumn woods! And some perfectly frivolous pictures which aren't in the least inspiring or uplifting,--and every single girl's room shall have a _pink pincushion_!" Then at their blankness, she softened. "Oh, very well,--you shall have your tubs and your linoleum, if you'll let me humanize the rest of the house,--will you?" She came to her feet with a spring of incredible energy. "Come along, Miss Ellis,--let's have a look upstairs! We don't need you, M.D.--this is woman-stuff."

The superintendent pulled herself upstairs with a sticky hand on the banister, "Well, I don't know where you'd begin, Miss Vail. Everything's threadbare...."

They went through drab halls and into drab rooms where drab occupants greeted them drably, and Jane ached with the ugliness of it. Wasn't it going to be fun--_if_ the play went over "big"--to vanquish this much of the hideousness of the world?

She stopped before a closed door. "What is this?"

Miss Ellis was walking past it. "That's my room."

"Well, may I see it?"

"Oh," she said, colorlessly, "I didn't suppose you'd want to fix _it_ over...." She opened the door and stepped in, crossing to the undraped window and running up the stiff shade of faded and streaked olive green.

"But of course I shall," said Jane, following her in. "Well--I might have known!"

"What?" asked Miss Ellis, defensively.

"That you'd take the smallest and shabbiest room in the house for yourself."

"Oh, well ... it doesn't matter. I'm not in it very much." She walked over to the warped golden oak bureau and straightened the metal b.u.t.ton hook with the name of a shoe shop pressed into it into line with the whisk broom. Besides these two articles there bloomed upon the bureau's top a small pincushion made from a piece of California redwood bark, and a widowed saucer enrolled as a pin-tray, and into the frame of the mirror was stuck a snapshot of an unnecessarily plain small boy.

"That's my little nephew," said Emma Ellis, seeing Jane's eye upon it.

"My sister Bertha's boy."

"He--he looks _bright_, doesn't he?" said Jane, hastily. She looked about her, consideringly. "You know, I'd like to do this room in deep creamy yellow. That will make it look lighter and seem larger, and it will be nice with your hair."

"My hair?..." said Miss Ellis, limply.

"You have such nice hair, but I do wish you'd do it differently," said Jane with anxious friendliness. "You have a _mile_ of it, haven't you?"

The superintendent's tucked-in lips and her whole taut figure visibly relaxed. "I _used_ to have nice hair," she admitted in the time-hallowed formula. "I wish you could have seen it four years ago. It's come out something terrible! Well," she made a virtue of it--"I never spend any time fussing with it."

"But you ought to, you know! Let me play with it a minute, will you? I adore doing hair. Please sit down--I just want to try something with it--something I thought of as I watched you to-day." She pressed her into a stiff chair.

"Well ..." said Miss Ellis grudgingly. She produced a comb from a bleakly neat top drawer.

"Heavens, what neatness," said Jane. "And the brush, please! You ought to give it a hundred and twenty strokes a night,--see, like this? No, it wouldn't be wasting time! Just consider the good thoughts you could be thinking. You could memorize poetry or dates in history or say your prayers,--and you'd say a prayer of thankfulness in a year, when you looked at the result. It would shine like patent leather." Her fingers flew. "There! Now you can look. See how it brings out the good lines of your face? Wait,--where's your hand mirror? You haven't one? My word!

Well, you can get the idea, even so! Will you try doing it this way? It won't take but a minute longer. Just to please me?"

"Well ..." she couldn't seem to think of anything else to say, and she had a ridiculous feeling that she might be going to cry.

"And--do you mind my saying these things?--I've always bullied my friends about their clothes and colors--I do wish you wouldn't wear white, and navy blue."

"I always supposed _white_ was right for every one."

"It's wicked for most people! Cream, buff, tan, apricot, burnt orange--Let me come down and go shopping with you some day, will you? I never cared about dressing dolls but I revel in dressing people."

"Well ..." said Miss Ellis once more, and this time her stubborn chin quivered.

"Shall we go downstairs?" Jane moved ahead of her, her eyes averted, her voice cheerfully commonplace. "Simply torrid up here, isn't it? I'll come some cool morning, and we'll make lists and plans--_if_ my play goes over----"

But before her gay little play had been running three months, picking up speed like a motor as it ran--she had kept her word to Hope House. She became the Lady Bountiful of the bathtubs and linoleums, of the frivolous lay pictures and the autumn shaded lamps, and she wrote impudently to Sarah Farraday that when she looked upon all that she had created she saw that it was very good.

Even Emma Ellis has undergone a sea change; she's learned to do her hair decently, and I've actually persuaded her that while it's quite right to let her light so shine before men, it's different with her nose, and you can't think what a dusting of flesh-colored powder does for her! And I've got her out of blue serge and white blouses, and into cream and buff and orange and brown, and I daresay Michael Daragh will now fall in love with her excellent qualities and her enhanced appearance, and I shall lose my best friend. (E.E. would never allow friendships.) I shall probably wish I'd left her in her state of Ugly Ducklingness, for I simply can't spare St. Michael from my scheme of things!

CHAPTER XIII

Jane and the Irishman came into the Settlement one day to find the superintendent red-eyed, with two books on her desk. It was clear that she had been having a luxuriously miserable time. "I've just finished two of the most powerful stories," she said, polishing the precious powder from her nose with a damp handkerchief. "Every girl should read them--and every _man_!"

"I wonder at you, Emma Ellis," said Michael Daragh, "the way you'll be keening over a printed tale, when you've your heart and head and hands full of real woes about you, surely!"

"Oh, Mr. Daragh, if you'd just sit down and read _I_ and _The Narrow Path_! Both written anonymously,--and you just _feel_ the human heartthrob in every line."

"I'll not be cluttering my mind with the likes of that, woman dear!"

"I've read them both," said Jane, slipping out of her furs and cuddling into one of the great new chairs, "and I'm afraid I think they're fearful piffle."

"Miss Vail!" Her face snapped back into its old lines. (Miss Vail really mustn't think that because she was so situated, financially, that she could do kind and generous things--which others would do if they could--that her word was law on every subject!)

"I'll have to be reading them, to decide between the two of you," said Michael, lighting his mellowed old pipe.

Miss Ellis winced a little as she looked at her new curtains.

"But it's good for moths," said Jane, catching her eye. "No, Michael, you needn't fuss up your orderly mind with anything so frivolous and distracting. I can tell you the gist of them both in a few well-chosen phrases! The theme of both is that when lovely--and lonely--woman stoops to earning her own living she finds--not too late, but alas, immediately--that men betray! That every prospect pleases and only man is vile! These two heroines set out to make their own way; their faces are their fortune and very nearly their finish! One is a very young girl, the other an unhappy wife, fleeing with, and, one might be pardoned for imagining, protected by, a young child. Each is a pattern of dewy innocence and determined virtue, but no matter where they hie or hide, the villains still pursue."

"Of course," said Miss Ellis in her small, smothered voice, "if you're going to make a _joke_ of it----"

"My dear Miss Ellis, it _is_ a joke! One of them gets no further than the station in her initial flight when she is accosted by a young millionaire--insulted. (If you were a Constant Reader of popular fiction, Michael Daragh, you'd know how difficult it is for millionaires to retain the shreds of human decency.) And that's just the prelude, but it introduces the motif which runs through the entire composition.

Staid, middle-aged husbands of friends, editors, business men, authors,--Don Juans all! Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, enmesh the road the ladies are to wander in."

"Well," said Michael Daragh, shaking his head, "I'm telling you there's a rare lot of enmeshing, Jane Vail."

Emma Ellis wagged an eager head. "You can't possibly know, in your sheltered life----"

"But I've been about a bit in my day--(didn't I come from my verdant village to the wicked metropolis?)--and I've known men in all ages and stages. My feeling is that these girls must have had a small 'come-hither' in one eye at least, or occasionally men might have pa.s.sed the b.u.t.ter without a sinister meaning, might have seen them home without attempting to abduct them!"

"You came directly to Mrs. Hills, whom you had known for years," said Emma Ellis. "And you knew that Mr. Harrison who helped you to place your writing, and you had enough money to live on."

"But I've roamed the city alone, all hours of night or day, and I used to go back and forth to boarding-school alone--a day's and a night's journey, and abroad I used to trot off to galleries and museums by myself, and----"

"But you always had your background, Jane Vail, the way you knew how safe you were."

"You can't prove these books are foolish by _your_ experience, Miss Vail." Emma Ellis was glowing from the Irishman's championship.