"Oh, oh, I wish I was home!" she whispered finally, and then, like the martyr that she felt herself, she sat up, wiped her eyes, and wondered what was in the box her mother had sent over. Things to eat, Mabel reflected, as she opened parcel after parcel and found that a whole Sunday dinner was hers. She put it in the ice-box and wearily started to clear up the dusty and untidy rooms. The sink was full of dishes, and as soon as the water was hot in the boiler, she attacked the piles of plates and cereal dishes. By the time they were washed and dried and put away and the rooms swept and dusted, Mabel was too tired to think of getting herself any dinner, even though it was waiting for her in the box her mother had sent over. So she curled up in a corner of the divan and tried to read. She could not interest herself in her novel, and at last she sat staring moodily at the room, studying its complicated and fussy furnishings and comparing them with the simple, quiet arrangement of her mother's house. Mabel had had occasion to see a number of homes during the time she had worked with Miss Gere and it was dawning on Miss Mabel that there was a certain charm and beauty about her mother's simple and unpretentious arrangements that were sadly lacking in many of the most luxurious places. She had never thought of this until a woman who stood very high in the social world of Louisville had asked her if she was related to the Mrs. Brewster who was doing interior decorating.
Mabel flushed with embarrassment and said in a small voice that Mrs.
Brewster was her mother.
"How fortunate you are!" said the great lady. "Your mother is the most artistic person I have ever known. She is perfectly wonderful and will certainly make a fortune. I am trying to get her to go to New York where she can have a studio and command top prices. I don't see why she did not go into this years and years ago."
Mabel, almost too surprised to reply, managed to mumble that she supposed her mother had been pretty busy bringing up her brother Frank and herself.
"Well, I suppose she feels that she is really free now," said the lady with a smile, "since you are starting out for yourself. Although," she added, "I think your mother is very brave to let you start out of the nest so soon. You seem such a young girl to be off by yourself. Of course it is not at all my affair, but I should think that you would hate to be away from such a talented mother as yours."
As Mabel recalled this conversation, she saw her mother in a new light and somehow the new light blazed almost too strongly on Mabel herself.
She felt strangely small. She had this disagreeable dwindling sensation more and more as she compared her mother with other women in professional and business and social circles, the three great groups that made their influence strongly felt throughout the city.
Mabel found too that her Great Experiment, instead of bringing her the envy and admiration of her mates, seemed in some strange way to make her the object of a kind of scorn that was very hard to bear. The very girls who had applauded her most loudly at first showed her in unmistakable small ways that she was doing something foolish instead of something brave and grand. But Mabel would not give in. She was not brave enough.
It was an endless Sunday. She did not go to church, no one came to see her, and she would not go for her usual afternoon walk. Several times she started for the phone, intending to call Rosanna or Helen, then decided against it. Finally she took up the long neglected Girl Scout Manual and read steadily as far as the page that had caught Claire's attention.
"Loyalty." The word stood out black and threatening on the page.
"Loyalty to father and mother." Was she loyal to her talented mother, the mother who had laid aside all her gifts in order to give all her time and strength to her two children? Wasn't it her place now to lighten some of her mother's household cares and make it possible for her to gain the reward she deserved?
Mabel, like Claire, threw the book angrily away from her. But unlike Claire, she could not throw her thoughts away. She was very unhappy.
CHAPTER VIII
The following morning, however, Mabel was once more filled with her usual self-esteem. Before going to sleep she had written a poem which would have sounded more original if it had not been so very like several well-known bits of verse she had often read. But to Mabel it seemed to spring from her soul, and after reading it with tears of appreciation in her eyes, she decided to let the _Times-Leader_ have the privilege of printing it.
That was to be a strange, terrible and eventful Monday. The Day of Overheard Conversations Mabel might have named it.
There was nothing to warn her of the day's disagreeable outcome. It was one of Louisville's loveliest mornings, and there was enough left from her Sunday dinner to give her a good breakfast. She was up early enough to go over her lessons, and the apartment as she left it after Sunday's violent cleaning had a look of righteous order and dustlessness. Also, having read the poem a number of times, Mabel saw herself as the coming poetess and preened herself accordingly.
One of the nicest girls in high school overtook Mabel and they walked to school together. It was in the cloak-room that Mabel received her first stab. The other stepped around the end of a cloak rack where she was met by a third girl whom Mabel knew but slightly.
"Hello, Grace," she heard her say. "I stopped at your house but you had gone."
"Yes, I walked to school with Mabel Brewster," replied Grace.
"Well, how you can stand her _I_ don't know," said the other girl with a sniff. "Of all the stupid prigs she is the worst!"
"Oh, I wouldn't say _that_," said Grace gently.
"Well, _I_ would!" declared the other girl stubbornly. "She thinks she is a wonder and knows everything, when in fact she is stupid and conceited, and _no_ one likes her."
Grace was a Girl Scout and this talk shocked her. She shook her head. "I don't think you are really right, Mary, and besides I don't think you ought to speak so."
"It is true, just the same," said the girl stubbornly. "You know yourself what her marks are--just as low as she can stand and pass. And that way she has of smiling in such a superior way when anyone else misses. And when _she_ misses she always has such a good excuse! I do wonder why the teachers stand for it!"
A group of laughing and chattering girls came into the cloak-room and Mabel seized the opportunity to slip into the hall and into the class-room. Her face burned. Of course she told herself that the girl was jealous, but Mabel was one of those persons who require the approval and admiration of those about her in order to be happy.
She did such poor work that morning that she was obliged to stay after school, although she knew that she ought to be at the office. She took her books to a desk in the reference library where she was soon lost in her work.
Presently she heard the low voices of a couple of teachers. They came and seated themselves on the other side of a big blackboard just behind Mabel.
"Oh, dear," sighed one of them, "this weather makes me long for vacation."
"The last weeks of school are always a drag," answered the other. "And I think the children feel it as much as we teachers. Even my brightest pupils are letting down, and the marks have all fallen off."
"Even Mabel Brewster's marks?" queried Miss Jones with a sniff.
"What a goose that girl is!" said Miss Hannibal. "I don't know what does ail her."
"An inflated ego," said Miss Jones.
"Novels and the New Woman Movement, I think," said Miss Hannibal. "It is a perfect shame. I feel _so_ sorry for her mother. Here this girl, as soon as she gets where she would naturally be of some service and comfort to her mother, steps gaily out of all her responsibilities and home duties and sets up a home of her own and goes around talking about a career. _Career_, indeed! Why, the child has nothing to career _on_!
She did not inherit her mother's cleverness. If she was _my_ child, I would send her to her room and keep her there on bread and water until she came to her senses."
"So would I," said Miss Jones, "but it is really none of our business, of course."
"Well, in a way it is," answered Miss Hannibal testily. "You see she is doing very poor school work, and the Principal told me yesterday that he would probably have to drop her from her class at the end of the school year. And she _won't_ work, because she is so crazy over that silly newspaper job that she simply neglects everything else. I just _don't_ see what ails her mother!"
"Does her mother know what poor work she is doing in school?" asked Miss Jones.
"I don't know," said Miss Hannibal. "And I don't know what good it would do if she did. A girl who thinks as little of her mother as Mabel does would not care what she thought and would not listen to her advice. You may be sure that she has cost her mother many bitter tears already. _I_ shan't worry about her. She spoils my thoughts. I have wanted to ask you how the Morrisson boys are doing."
Miss Jones proceeded to enthuse over the Morrissons, but for once their achievements did not interest Mabel at all. She was stunned and angry.
Yet as she sat huddled motionless in her corner, waiting for the teachers to go, she soon recovered her balance, and reflected that they too were probably jealous. She thought fondly of her position on the newspaper and proudly dreamed her dream of the day when she would drift into the magic circle of the Chief Editor's desk as his best reporter.
When Miss Hannibal and Miss Jones sauntered away, Mabel lost no time in making good her own escape. She crossed over to Third Street where the beautiful houses with their look of reserve and wealth always catered to her love of luxury. Ahead were three girls in Girl Scout uniforms. She recognized them at once: Rosanna Horton with her black docked hair, Claire Maslin's long swinging red braid and Elise Hargrave's bobbing curls. At first Mabel decided to walk slowly and avoid them but she changed her mind and caught up with them.
"Do you still like the work you are doing?" asked Claire in her soft drawl.
"I suppose so," said Mabel, and then as though forced into honesty, she added, "The trouble is, I miss mother and Frank so that I don't seem to do all the work I planned after all. It doesn't seem to be working out right. Of course I shall go on with it, because I really owe it to myself, but it isn't half the fun I thought it was going to be."
"I knew it," said Elise Hargrave gently. "It is a most dreadful thing to be _torn_ from the home nest, and when one hops out by one's self and waves that not so strong wing one must of a necessity wish to be back."
"Why don't you give up and go home?" said Rosanna. "You would be doing the wise thing."
"No, I can't," said Mabel. "I suppose some day when I am famous, I will perhaps take mother and Frank to live with me." She laughed and nodded as she left the girls and hurried on to the _Times-Leader_ office.
"She means it; she actually _means_ it!" said Rosanna in a hushed voice.
"Of course she means it!" laughed Claire. "Isn't she funny? I never saw a girl so conceited in my life. And really she _isn't_ bright at all.
She is just an ordinary girl with ordinary gifts. I think she is usually quite stupid when she talks, but perhaps that is because she is so awfully conceited that it bores you."
"I hate to hear you say such things about her," said the tender-hearted Rosanna.
When Mabel reached the office she went directly to the big shabby dictionary open on its stand, and looked up two words, _Inflated_, and _ego_. The result was not pleasing! She sat before the book, glooming over the unflattering result of her quest. So she had an "inflated ego," had she? As she sat there, the office boy, seeing her close to his letter-press and feeling himself capable of starting an acquaintance with any girl his own size, pulled his purple and gold necktie into place, seized a few sheets of paper, and sauntered up. Mabel continued to stare at the open page of the dictionary.