Effie went straight on out the door, feeling sorry for her mother, having a dim sense that the baby was unreasonable, and life hard, anyway. But it never occurred to her that she had anything to do with it until she was flying along the south road fully a mile from home, and the fresh breeze fanning her face had somewhat cooled the tempest in her heart. She was beginning to feel more like herself and trying to decide if there was any way in which she might change that would affect the feelings of others toward her. There was Mother, for instance, again—yes, Mother, sitting in the gathering shadows at this moment, stealing the last rays of light to sew the dark garment that she expected to wear on the morrow to pay her last tribute to a dear old school friend who was done with this life. Mother’s little excursions and holidays, somehow, were almost always set apart for last sad rites and duties of neighborly kindness. It was strange about Mother, how she never seemed to have any good times for her own. Effie never thought of it before. How nice it would be if Mother was on a bicycle, flying along by her side! But Mother on a bicycle! How funny it would be! She couldn’t learn to ride in the first place, she was so timid. And then how could she get time? She was at this minute doing two things at once, and that baby was very hard to take care of. It was hard that Mother couldn’t even get her dress done without being hindered. Well! There was something. Why had she not thought of that before?
She turned her bicycle so suddenly that a little dog that was trotting along in the road, thinking he knew just where Effie was going, almost got his tail cut off.
Back she flew faster than she had come, and bursting in the door, threw her hat on a chair and grabbed the baby from the floor at his mother’s feet, where he was vainly endeavoring to pull himself up to a standing posture by her skirt. Mrs. Martin gave a nervous jump as Effie entered, and another anxious “Oh, take care, Effie!” as the baby was tossed into the air. But Effie, intent on doing good for once in her life, was doing it as she did everything else: with a vengeance, and she went on tossing the baby higher and higher, regardless of her mother’s protests. Each crow of the baby made Effie more eager to amuse him. She whirled around the room with him in her arms, tumbling over a chair occasionally, but not minding that in the least. She danced along to the middle of the room under the gas fixture, and just as her mother rose hastily and dropped her sewing, saying, “Effie, I insist—” she tossed the excited baby high into the air and brought the curly head sharp against the chandelier. Then the fun ceased. The baby screamed, and the mother rushed and caught him to her breast, and with reproachful looks at the penitent Effie, sent for hot water and Pond’s Extract. The others coming in gathered around the darling of the house and hesitated not to reproach Effie for her part in the mischief until her anger flamed forth. Seeing that the baby had recovered and was apparently not seriously injured, she rushed from the room to her own in another torrent of weeping. This time she knelt before the open window and watched the lights through her tears, as they peeped out here and there over the village, and felt bitter toward them and toward everything. Why should she be the one always to blame for everything that happened? Here she had given up her ride when she was having a good time, and had come home to help Mother and was greeted only with an exclamation of fear, and then this had happened—a thing that might have happened if he had been with any of the others, she thought. She was scolded for what she had intended should be a relief and a help to Mother, and that was all the good she had done. Much progress she had made in her own reformation! She would not be likely to go on in it very far if this was the result of her first trial, and her heart grew hard and bitter again.
By and by, the dinner bell rang and she went sulkily down, took her place, and ate in silence until Eleanor, full of her afternoon, put another sting in the already very sad heart of her sister. It appeared that she had gone to the committee meeting at the Garner’s, probably after her sister had left the hedge.
“Mamma,” she said, with the haughtiness of her lately acquired young ladyhood, “I do wish you would reprove Effie. She is forever making herself obnoxious. I found out that she had been poking around trying to get in with our crowd. She’s nothing but a child!”
“It’s an awful pity you and Eff have to live in the same town with each other, Nell, she gives you so much trouble,” put in Johnnie, the outspoken younger brother.
“Johnnie, you’re very saucy, and that isn’t smart at all,” responded Eleanor, flattening her eyelids down in a way she had that she fancied was very reproving to her brother.
“Mamma, I wish you would tell Effie that you won’t allow her, under any circumstances, to go with us next week on our ride. She is getting very troublesome. I——”
But Eleanor was interrupted by Effie, whose black eyes flashed fire and tears as she rose from the table, her dinner only half finished.
“It isn’t in the least necessary for you to ask Mamma to do any such thing. I wouldn’t go if you dragged me! I know exactly every word those precious girls of yours have said about me this afternoon, and they are a mean, selfish lot, who care nothing about anything but clothes! I only hope you’ll enjoy the company of those who speak that way about your sister. I should not, not even if they had been talking about you. But you may rest easy about me; I won’t trouble you anymore. I’ve been made to understand most thoroughly that nobody in this world wants me. I’m sure I can’t tell what I was made for, anyway.” And with a voice that trembled with her utter humiliation and defeat, she stalked from the room, her lifted chin and haughty manner barely lasting till the dining-room door shut her from the family gaze, when she burst into uncontrolled tears and rushed upstairs for the third time that day to her own little room.
“Why, what does she mean, Eleanor?” asked the pained voice of the father, laying down the evening paper, behind which he had been somewhat shielded from the avalanche of talk around him. “What have you done to the child? Why hasn’t she as much right to go riding as the rest of you? I thought that was why we bought the seven-passenger car, so there would be plenty of room for anybody that wanted to go?”
“You don’t understand,” said Eleanor with reddening cheeks, and she attempted to explain to her father the fine distinctions of age and class in the society in which she moved. But somehow her father could not be made to understand, and the end of it was that Eleanor was told that if her sister was not welcomed on the ride, then she could not go. Rebellious and angrier than ever at Effie, she declared she would stay at home then. So it came about that the Martin household was not in a happy frame of mind that evening at the close of their evening meal. And the two sisters lay down to rest with hard thoughts of each other.
Effie, as she turned her light out, knelt a moment beside her window to look at the stars and murmur the form of prayer that had been so much a part of her bringing up that she scarcely realized what it all meant. “Help me to be good,” was one of the oft-repeated sentences, and Effie no longer felt it necessary for her thoughts to stay by to see that these words were spoken to the One above who was supposed to be her guard and guide. She fancied herself, on the whole, rather good as goodness in girls went. Now, to-night, as she finished her petition, which was rather a repetition, she looked up to the stars she loved and thought of a scrap of poetry she had picked up in her reading, which she was not well-enough taught to know was wonderful. It ran thus:
All that I know
Of a certain star
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue;
Till my friends have said
They would fain see too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!
Then it stops like a bird; like a flower hangs furled:
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.
Poor little, lonely,