Plain Jane and pretty Betty

Apparently Jane was very much at ease as she gave her hand to Mr. Browning and smiled at him. In reality she was only a frightened girl wondering what would happen next.

But Mr. Browning was very nice, very courteous and pleasant, and before they had been in conversation five minutes Jane felt that they would get along together and that the change she had so dreaded was not going to be so dreadful after all.

For the rest of that day Jane remained in almost complete charge of the office while her old employer and new went over details of the business together.

Mr. Garwick was very nice, often referring to her and asking her for certain details that he knew she had right at her tongue’s end.

Jane felt that he was doing this to impress Mr. Browning with her worth, and she appreciated and in her heart thanked him for it even while tears of regret rose often to her eyes at thought of severing the old connection.

The day was over at last. Mr. Garwick slapped down a huge sheaf of papers on the desk and rose to his feet. He held out a hand to Mr. Browning.

Jane watched them, her heart beating rapidly, knowing that the moment of parting had come.

“Well, I’ve done all I can for you, Browning,” Mr. Garwick said, as the two men shook hands heartily. “If there’s anything you want to know about, you know where you can get in touch with me at a moment’s notice. Although,” and here he turned to Jane, “I’m quite sure you will find I am leaving you a veritable dictionary of information in the person of Miss Cross here. Call on her for anything, Browning, and if you’re ever disappointed in her, then my name’s not John Garwick!”

Feeling embarrassed but very grateful to her old employer, Jane found herself shaking hands with him and saying with a little catch behind the words:

“Thank you for—everything, Mr. Garwick. I wish you the best luck in the world!”

There was a pleasant response, and then the door closed behind John Garwick and Jane was left alone with her new employer.

“Well, Miss Cross,” Mr. Browning was speaking and Jane liked the way he included her in his sweeping gesture about the office, “we seem to have been left in possession of the field. We’ve done about enough work for one day, I should think. Suppose we close the office and start fresh again to-morrow morning?”

Jane gave him a smile that said she would be perfectly willing, and went for her hat. She put it on and went toward the door. Mr. Browning rose and came over to her, holding out his hand.

“Mr. Garwick has given me a most excellent recommendation of you,” he said. Jane thought how handsome he was but how tired he looked with those deep lines about the corners of his mouth. “I am convinced that I could not have a worthier helper than Miss Jane Cross. I hope you will find things just as pleasant here as you did under Mr. Garwick’s regime.”

Jane thanked him and went out. She was very thoughtful all the way home.

“I like him—and I’m very sorry for him,” she told herself, remembering the lines of suffering in the face of her new employer. “What a shame that his wife and daughter can’t stand by him now! I’d like to go to that Betty Browning and give her a piece of my mind!”

Meanwhile, the subject of Jane’s rather strenuous reflections was living through a period in her life that seemed to the former rich girl as bewildering and tantalizing as a dream.

Her solid world had been knocked from beneath her feet. Everything was new, unreal. The only solid fact of her existence was her father, and to him she clung with a desperation that soon ripened into a beautiful affection.

“I never knew dad before,” she told herself, wondering. “He seemed always to be there, but I just never—thought about him!”

That had been the fault of her up-bringing, though Betty did not realize it. Brought close to the hard facts of existence, she could see her father as an individual, not merely the holder of the money-bags to whom one went when the allowance ran short and a new dress seemed an absolute necessity.

Viewed as an individual, Betty found her father very interesting and, more than anything else, lovable. He responded to her new personal dependence upon him in a wonderful way, and Betty began to wonder vaguely if, in losing everything she had heretofore regarded as necessary to her very existence, she had not found something far more precious and desirable in the new relationship between herself and her father.

The parting with her mother was a wrench—a bad one. Betty loved her mother despite the fact that she was bewildered by the selfish indifference with which she treated the man who had suffered so much.

Mrs. Browning’s father had evidently known his daughter, and he had left her the little he had to leave in the form of an annuity. It was a meager income according to Mrs. Browning’s standards, but at least it would not leave her a penniless dependent on her relatives, to whom she now went for the sake of the ease and luxury of their homes and to escape the narrow life her husband could give her in the little cottage.

“You don’t think of dad at all, mother,” Betty protested the day before Mrs. Browning was to leave Greenville for an indefinite stay with her relatives. “Don’t you suppose he is having a bad time, at all?”

“He deserves it,” Mrs. Browning snapped back at her. “He has been criminally careless, and he deserves everything he gets! In a case like this it’s the innocent family that suffers every time.”

“I don’t know as we have been so innocent,” said Betty slowly.

Her mother whirled about and stared at her for all the world, thought Betty, as though she were looking at a stranger. And so she was, for Mrs. Browning, who thought she knew her daughter so well, was looking at this Betty for the first time.

“Not innocent! What do you mean, Elizabeth?”

Betty turned and met her mother’s cold glance steadily.

“Well, we have gone on spending money just the same, haven’t we?” said the girl. “Even when dad said we were too extravagant and asked us to be careful, we never tried to help him. I am only trying to say,” she added, seeing that her mother’s stony gaze never wavered from her, “that perhaps dad isn’t altogether to blame for—what happened.”

“This is your father’s work,” said Mrs. Browning angrily. “He has turned you against me!”

“Oh, never!” cried Betty. “He has never said a word!”

“Silence!” Mrs. Browning held up a white, jeweled hand—she had refused to part with any of her jewels. “I’ll not listen to another word. If you prefer your father to me, Elizabeth, you are free to make your choice. Stay here with him—and may you enjoy the experience more than I think you will!”

That was the first wrench. The second came with the actual selling and vacating of their house.

That was hard, for pretty Betty had loved her home, and the thought of moving into strange quarters, poor ones, filled her with terror.

She shrank from the solicitude of her friends. Some of them, to whom the social leadership of the Brownings had always been a thorn in the flesh, gloated almost openly. Others pretended sympathy and patronizingly gave Betty to understand that a mere loss of fortune need make no difference in their relations.

But it scarcely mattered which group they belonged to, for Betty was to realize with an aching sense of loss that among all her so-called friends there was not one—not one!—who had an actual claim to that term! She began to realize dimly that just as she had failed to think of her father, so she had failed, by her selfishness, to make true and lasting friends.

She came to long only for the time when she and her father might be alone together in whatever place he might choose for them. There would be some privacy at least, a place where they could shut the door against the cruel curiosity of their “friends.”

Again her father was the only solid, real, unchanging thing on her horizon.

Despite his absorption in the winding up of his affairs and preparation for a new start in business, he watched her closely with those understanding eyes of his and seemed ever at her side when she needed comfort.

There was that time after Gladys Vane had been to call and had left Betty wincing beneath the venomous thrusts of her poisonous tongue.

Mr. Browning came in as Gladys went out. He made straight for the library and found Betty crouched in one of the big chairs, staring unseeingly before her.

“Never mind, Betty,” her father said and touched her cheek gently as he sat on the arm of her chair. “The life we’re going to, you and I, may not be as glittery as the one we’re leaving but it’s a lot more real. You will make real friends from now on, Betty girl, friends that are worthy of the name.”

“Well,” said Betty bravely as she cuddled her cheek against his hand, “I’ve got one mighty good friend, already! Daddy,” she added after a pause, “I don’t see quite how it was, but I guess it was in part my fault. I wasn’t always nice to the girls, and if we don’t give friendship I suppose we don’t get it—not the real kind.”

Then there was the day when they were to move into their “new quarters” as Mr. Browning always called the cottage he had rented for himself and Betty.

Betty had never seen it—she could not bring herself to speak of it even to her father.

No one ever learned how she had pictured the place in her mind, nor just what kind of life she thought she was to be called upon to endure, now that they were poor.

Her mother had so harped upon their poverty and pictured the horrors of it so vividly that it was not at all strange if, in trying to picture it to herself, Betty beheld in her mind the ugly vision of the tenements across the railroad where herded a drifting, lazy class of occasional workers and sometimes beggars of Greenville with their slipshod families.

However that may be, when the day of her actual parting with the old life arrived Betty found herself in sore need of comfort.

She was standing by the window in her own sitting room, watching for the van that was to take a few—a very few—of their belongings to the new home, when she heard her father’s quick step in the hall.

Betty felt her father’s hands on her shoulders, turning her about so that she must face him. There were telltale tears in her eyes, but she smiled, hoping that he would not notice them.

He did notice them, as he noticed everything about her now. The lines about his eyes and mouth deepened and he looked very tired, almost old.

“The van will be here in a few minutes, Betty,” he said. “And before it comes, I want to tell you a few things about our new home—I want to prepare you.”

“It’s coming!” thought Betty. She braced her shoulders for the shock, but even then did not forget to smile. How tired he looked, how weary and discouraged. She would not make things harder for him!

“It’s very different from this; but it’s not so bad, Betty. It’s a little cottage set well back from the street, and it has five rooms in it that could be made into a home—if anybody cared—” His voice broke but he went on quickly. “It has a pleasant kitchen and a nice porch with neglected roses that might be coaxed into blooming sometime—perhaps next spring. It isn’t so bad, Bettykin. We might be pretty happy there——”

Looking into his pleading, tired eyes, Betty forgot herself, forgot everything but that he was appealing to her for hope and comfort and that she must not fail him.

“Why, then, daddy,” she said, putting her arms about him, “I’ll make a home for you. We’ll make it together. And, daddy dear, I do love roses!”

If Betty had wanted any reward she got it in the strength of his arms about her and his muffled cry.

“Betty, I knew you had it in you—you good little sport!”