And then the ladies took up the servant-girl problem, and canvassed it hopelessly until the men were heard entering the library.
While Mrs. Ward was discussing her maid with her guests, Gusta was hurrying homeward alone, the prey of fears, omens and forebodings. There was the shock of this sudden news from home, and her horror of what awaited her there; besides she had a strange feeling about leaving the Wards in this way. The night had grown bitterly cold. The frozen snow crunched with a whining noise under her heels as she passed swiftly along. In the light of the arc-lamps that swung at the street crossings, the trees along the curb cast their long shadows before her, falling obliquely across the sidewalk and stretching off into the yard; as she passed on, they wheeled, lost themselves in gloom, then appeared again, stretching the other way. The shadows confused and frightened her. She thought of Elizabeth and all her kindness; when would she see Elizabeth again? With this horrible thing at home all had changed; her mother would need her now. She thought of the hard work, with the children crying about, and the ugly kitchen, with none of the things there were at the Wards’ to make the work easy. She would have to lug the water in from the cistern; the pump would be frozen, and the water would splash on her hands and make them red and raw and sore; they could never be white and soft like Elizabeth’s. She would have to shovel the snow, and make paths, and split kindlings, and carry wood and coal, and make fires. And then the house would never be warm like the Wards’; they would eat in the kitchen and sit there all day long. The storm, which had made no change at all at the Wards’, would make it all so much harder at home. Her father would be sick a long time; and, of course, he would lose his job; the house would be gloomy and sad; it would be worse than the winter he had been on strike.
The keen wind that was blowing from the northwest stung Gusta’s face; she felt the tears in her eyes, and when they ran on to her cheeks they froze at once and made her miserable. She shuddered with the cold, her fingers were numb, her feet seemed to be bare on the snow, her ears were burning. The wind blew against her forehead and seemed as if it would cut the top of her head off as with a cold blade. She tried to pull her little jacket about her; the jacket was one Elizabeth had given her, and she had always been proud of it and thought that it made her look like Elizabeth, but it could not keep her warm now. She ran a few steps, partly to get warm, partly to make swifter progress homeward, partly for no reason at all. She thought of her comfortable room at the Wards’ and the little colored pictures Elizabeth had given her to hang about the walls. An hour before she had expected to go to that room and rest there,--and now she was going home to sickness and sorrow and ugly work. She gave a little sob and tried to brush away her tears, but they were frozen to her eye-lashes, and it gave her a sharp pain above her eyes when she put her hand up to her face.