Plain Jane and pretty Betty

The sisters were certainly the oddest pair that Jane had ever seen—these two who were to be their near neighbors while Jane and the Powells lived in Greenville.

Lydia, the elder of the two, was as different from her poor half-demented sister as it was possible for any one to be.

Lydia was tall, built on heroic lines with a breadth of shoulder amazing in a woman. She had a face that matched the rest of her, large featured, rugged, with a mouth that seldom smiled. When Lydia Terrin did smile, Jane was reminded of a sunbeam shining for a transient moment on a slab of jagged granite. The smile never lighted up her features, but lingered for a moment and then vanished, leaving one to wonder if she had really smiled at all.

Such was the woman who faced the weary travelers now over a pot of savory beef stew.

She did not smile. Her manner was almost forbidding. But the gesture of her long wooden spoon toward the table was unmistakable.

“Sit down,” she said. “We have been waiting for you as one pig waits for another. I hope you will like the stew, though it is not as good as the pot we made last week. Do you think so, Marion?”

“Mad Marion,” who had been pulling out the chairs of her guests, bowing and smiling all the time in a truly remarkable manner, started at the abrupt question. She looked bewildered, Jane thought, and a little frightened.

“Certainly, my dear! I mean certainly not!” cried the poor creature. “Oh dear, I’m not sure what I mean!”

“Don’t act so silly,” retorted sister Lydia sternly. “The trouble with you, Marion, is that you talk too much!”

Jane had an hysterical desire to giggle. She checked the desire since to have laughed at that moment would have been neither polite nor kind.

As she sank into a chair and allowed the “granite sister,” as she ever afterward called Lydia Terrin in her thoughts, fill a great plate with the steaming savory stew, Jane felt like Alice in her famous adventures in Wonderland.

“The poor little crazy sister could be the Mad Hatter,” she thought, as she accepted and buttered a slice of delicious bread. “And the other—well I don’t know who she’d be unless it was the Duchess who had a baby that turned into a pig. Oh, dear, maybe I’m crazy too!”

However, no eccentricities of the Terrin sisters could make that meal any other than a delicious, wonderfully satisfactory one.

“Guess I had better go to bed, if you’ll show me where I am to sleep,” Jane said, almost as soon as the meal was over and struggling to keep her heavy eyes open, and in a few minutes more was ushered to a room.

It did not take her long to undress, and then she slipped in between the caressing sheets of a bed as soft as the fleeciest cloud and breathed a deep sigh of utter weariness.

Then came morning, with a hot sun streaming in at her windows.

Jane’s first impulse was to jump up quickly and dress. She would be late for school!

Then came the swift realization that there would be no school this morning. They had left Coal Run, its dirt and confusion and misery behind them. This was Greenville, and though it might not be better than the mining town, it might be kinder.

She winced at the memory of her departure from Coal Run—of the children running down the road and calling after her tauntingly.

There was a stir in the room. Jane turned over quickly and saw poor Marion bobbing and smiling in the doorway.

“Breakfast’s ready. Oh, dear, yes! Been ready for some time.”

Jane jumped up, confused and sorry. She winced at the sudden action and felt tentatively her stiff muscles. She had forgotten the accident of yesterday and that she must expect to be lame and sore for some time to come.

“Oh, I’m sorry to have been so lazy,” she apologized, as the little woman continued to bob and smile in the doorway. “What must you think of me, coming here and sleeping so late?”

“Perfectly all right, my dear—perfectly. Tired out after yesterday. Yes, yes! Natural! Youth must be served!”

“Marion!” cried Lydia sternly from the kitchen. “Come out here! You talk too much!”

Poor Marion disappearing on the instant, Jane looked with wonder about the bare little room with its comfortable bed.

Who were these queer, eccentric women who kept house all alone, who seemed, by the furnishings of their house and the clothes they wore, to be very poor, and yet who were so hospitable to strangers?

She pondered the question as she dressed slowly and painfully.

There were purple bruises all over her and every joint and muscle protested as she moved.

“I’d better rub something on me or I won’t be of any use at all,” she thought ruefully.

In a few moments she had done all she could toward making herself presentable. Her clothes were torn from the accident of the previous day, and though she wore a comb in her sleek bobbed hair, there was no brush to smooth it to its usual plain neatness.

She felt uncomfortable and unlike her usual clean, neat self when she entered the large cozy front room of the Terrin sisters.

A delicious, plentiful breakfast served from the stove by Lydia helped to raise her spirits, and her heart warmed more than ever toward these two hospitable people.

Mr. and Mrs. Powell had breakfasted long before, Lydia told Jane, while Marion nodded and beamed at her from a chair across the table.

Jane could see from the window that the moving-men had returned and were unloading the furniture. Instantly she was impatient to be off and help Mrs. Powell with the hundred and one tasks she knew confronted her.

She finished a cup of hot chocolate and her second egg in hurried, grateful gulps, then pushed back her chair.

“You’ve both been awfully good,” she said, looking from Marion to her sister. “When we get settled you must come over and have dinner with us. I must run and help Mrs. Powell now.”

When she was gone both eccentric sisters stared after her for a moment.

“Old-fashioned little thing,” said Lydia, as she jerked a plate from the table and set it in the sink. “Plain but capable. I’ll bet my life she’s capable.”

“Oh, yes, by all means, very. Surely,” murmured Marion. She was muttering on vaguely when a stern glance from her sister sent her into deep confusion.

“You talk too much, Marion,” said Lydia. “Come, help me with the dishes.”

Next door at the house that had seemed so dreary the night before Jane found everything bustle and confusion and—sunshine. As she went from room to room Jane’s heart warmed to this sunniness, for there was scarcely a spot in the little house that did not receive a share of it. She wondered how she could ever have thought it dreary!

When she asked harassed, dust-grimed Mrs. Powell to set her to work, that lady confronted her with a list of things she needed from the general store.

“You will help me more by doing the shopping than in any other way, Jane. Why,” with a dramatic gesture of the hand, “I haven’t a thing to clean with, even.”

Jane smiled, for this indeed was tragedy to Mrs. Powell. She took the list and pledged herself to secure the articles on it. One of the moving men, a resident of Greenville, took it upon himself to direct her to “the best store in town.”

“You go down two short blocks,” he said, indicating the direction with the wave of a dirty, stubby forefinger. “Then you turn to your left and go up two long blocks until you come to the foot of Rose Hill, where all the swells live. There you’ll find Mason’s general store and you can get everything at Mason’s from canned soup to fish hooks.”

Jane thanked him and set out, glad to be free of the noise and confusion for a little while and have a look at the town from which she hoped so much.

Nor did Greenville disappoint her. It was as different from Coal Run as night is from day. Where in Coal Run were squalor, dirt, disorder; here was neatness, cleanliness, beauty. Greenville was a thriving town, and showed it. Its inhabitants shared in the general prosperity, and showed that too. The plainest little house was freshly painted and displayed its patch of carefully tended garden.

There was a poorer section in Greenville over beyond the railroad tracks, but Jane did not know this until some time later.

As she proceeded toward the center of town the girl’s delight grew. Here the houses became more pretentious until, at the foot of Rose Hill Jane could look up at handsome houses that seemed palatial to the dazzled eyes of the girl from Coal Run.

There was a store at hand, and a sign proclaimed it as Mason’s. This was the store, thought Jane, where one could get everything from “canned soup to fish hooks.”

Jane suddenly remembered her torn dress, her dusty shoes, her unbrushed hair. Mason’s was so immaculate that she hated to enter it as she was. Still, Mrs. Powell needed those things——

She marched resolutely to the door of the store and pulled it open. There was a gasp and a protest in a high, petulant, very pretty feminine voice.

“Oh, how stupid! You have made me drop my package!”