“Well?” said Mr. Corey amused, at the glowing color in her face.
“She’s in Germany and a very sick woman. It’s rheumatism, you know, and she’s been crippled a long time. I doubt anyhow if she’d care.”
Somewhere up above like pigeons fluttering forth from heaven’s dome came happiness winging down upon the girl.
“Oh, yes,--if you’ll have me,--indeed I’ll come back.... I’ll be there Monday morning! ... Oh, it will be _wonderful_!”
The cat was crying to get in. Jeannette, deep in slumber, was irritated by persistent mewings. Every once in awhile the outside screen door at the back of the apartment shut with a small clap as the animal, sinking its claws into the wire mesh, tried to pull it open. The noise awoke Jeannette finally and she sat up with a start.
It was morning. Gray light filled the room. She peered at the alarm clock, blinking her eyes, and saw there were still twenty minutes before she had to get up. In the next room, the sound of a closing window announced that Beatrice Alexander was already astir.
“She’s put Mitzi out,” thought Jeannette, drawing the bed clothes over an exposed shoulder. “I wish she’d remember to leave the door ajar.”
Presently Beatrice’s steps passed in the hall and in another moment the annoyance ceased. Jeannette dropped gratefully back to sleep. But it seemed she had hardly lost consciousness when the whirring clock bell aroused her again. Though still drowsy, she immediately got up; she never permitted herself to remain in bed after the moment arrived for rising; indulgence of this kind was weakness of character, and she despised weakness in herself or in others. As she dressed, she heard Beatrice in the kitchen busy with breakfast preparations. From the window a glimpse of the street showed the sun’s first rays striking obliquely through the haze of early morning.
The apartment in Waverly Place had now been her home for seven years; she and Beatrice Alexander had taken it together a month after her mother’s death, and life for the two women as time rolled on had become undeviating in its routine. There was small variation in their days.
It was Beatrice’s business to prepare breakfast. She rose at seven; Jeannette half-an-hour later. The meal was always the same: fruit, boiled eggs, four pieces of toast, and a substitute for coffee,--cubes of a prepared vegetable material dissolved in hot water. Beatrice set the table daintily, with a small Japanese lunch cloth and a yellow bowl filled with bright red apples in its center. Knives, forks and spoons were nicely arranged and she never neglected to put tumblers of drinking water beside the triangularly folded, fringed napkins, and finger-bowls at each place with a bit of peel sliced from the bottoms of the grapefruits or oranges which began the breakfast. Beatrice was a fastidious person, Jeannette often thought gratefully; she liked “things nice.”