Читать книгу Bread - Charles G. Norris - Страница 6

Jeannette passed through the dark intervening rooms of the apartment, catching up her shabby velvet hat from her bed, and came upon her sister Alice in the kitchen.

There was a marked contrast between the two girls. Jeannette, who was several months past her eighteenth birthday, was a tall, willowy girl with a smooth olive-tinted skin, dark eyes, brows and lashes, and straight, lustreless braids of hair almost dead black. She gave promise of beauty in a year or two,—of austere stateliness,—but now she appeared rather angular and ungainly with her thin shoulders and shapeless ankles. She was too tall and too old to be still dressed like a schoolgirl. Alice was only a year her junior, but Alice looked younger. She was softer, rounder, gentler. She had brown hair, brown eyes and a brown skin. “My little brown bird,” her mother had called her as a child. She was busy now at the stove, dumping and scraping out a can of tomatoes into a saucepan. Dinner was in process of preparation. Steam poured from the nozzle of the kettle on the gas range and evaporated in a thin cloud.

“Mama makes me so mad!” Jeannette burst out indignantly. “I wish she wouldn’t be borrowing money from the pupils! She just got ten cents out of Mildred Carpenter.”

She displayed the diminutive coin in her palm. Alice regarded it with a troubled frown.

“It makes me so sick,” went on Jeannette, “wheedling a dime out of a baby like that! I don’t believe it’s necessary, at least Mama ought to manage better. Just think of it! Borrowing money to buy a loaf of bread! ... We’ve come to a pretty state of things.”

“Aw—don’t, Janny,” Alice remonstrated; “you know how hard Mama tries and how people won’t pay their bills.... The Cheneys have owed eighty-six dollars for six months and it never occurs to them we need it so badly.”

“I’d go and get it, if I was Mama,” Jeannette said with determination, putting on her hat and bending her tall figure awkwardly to catch her reflection in a lower pane of the kitchen door. “I wouldn’t stand it. I’d call on old Paul G. Cheney at his office and tell him he’d have to pay up or find someone else to teach his children!”

“Oh, no, you wouldn’t, Janny!—You know that’d never do. Paul and Dorothy have been taking lessons off Mama for nearly three years. Mama’d lose all her pupils if she did things like that.”

“Well—” Jeannette drawled, suddenly weary of the discussion and opening the kitchen door into the hall, “I’m going down to Kratzmer’s.”