Just Patty by Jean Webster (the little red hen read aloud .TXT) 📕

"Isn't Jelly awful?" Patty demanded, still smarting from the recent insult. "She never used to be so bad. What on earth has got into her?"

"She is pretty snappy," Priscilla agreed. "But I like her just the same. She's so--so sort of spirited, you know--like a skittish horse."

"Urn," growled Patty. "I'd like to see a good, big, husky man get the upper hand of Jelly once, and just make her toe the mark!"

"You two will have to hurry," Priscilla warned, "if you want to get into your costumes up here. Martin starts in half an hour."

"We'll be ready!" Patty was already plunging her face into an inky mixture in the wash bowl.

The fancy-dress lawn fête, which St. Ursula's School held on the last Friday in every May, had occurred the evening before; and this afternoon the girls were redonning their costumes to make a trip to the village photographer's. The complicated costumes, that required time and space for their proper adjustment, were to be assumed at the school and driven down in the hearse. Those more simple of arrangement were to go in the trolley car, and be donned in the cramped quarters of the gallery dressing-room.

Patty and Conny, whose make-up was a very delicate matter, were dressing at the school. They had gone as Gypsies--not comic opera Gypsies, but real Gypsies, dirty and ragged and patched. (They had daily dusted the room with their costumes for a week before the fête.) Patty wore one brown stocking and one black, with a conspicuous hole in the right calf. Conny's toes protruded from one shoe, and the sole of the other flapped. Their hair was unkempt and the stain on their faces streaked. They were the last word in realism.

They scrambled into their dresses to-day with little ceremony, and hitched them together anyhow. Conny caught up a tambourine and Patty a worn-out pack of cards, and they clattered down the tin-covered back stairs. In the lower hall they came face to face with Miss Jellings, clothed in cool muslin, and in a more affable frame of mind. Patty never held her grudges long; she had already forgotten her momentary indignation at not being allowed to look at the clock.

"You cross-a my hand with silver? I tell-a your fortune."

She danced up to the gymnasium teacher with a flutter of scarlet petticoats, and poked out a dirty hand.

"Nice-a fortune," Conny added with a persuasive rattle of the tambourine. "Tall, dark-a young man."

"You impudent little ragamuffins!" Miss Jellings took them each by the shoulder and turned them for inspection. "What have you done to your faces?"

"Washed 'em in black coffee."

Miss Jellings shook her head and laughed.

"You're a disgrace to the school!" she pronounced. "Don't let any policeman see you, or he'll arrest you for vagabonds."

"Patty! Conny!--Hurry up. The hearse is starting."

Priscilla appeared in the doorway and waved her gridiron frantically. Priscilla, late about finding a costume, at the last moment had blasphemously gone as St. Laurence, draped in a sheet, with the kitchen broiler under her arm.

"We're coming! Tell him to wait." Patty dashed out.

"Don't you want a coat?" Conny shrieked after her.

"No--come on--we don't need coats."

The two raced down the drive after the wagonette--Martin never waited for laggards; he let them run and catch up. They sprang onto the rear step; and half-a-dozen outstretched hands hauled them in, head first.

They found the photographer's waiting-room a scene of the maddest confusion. When sixty excited people occupy the normal space of twelve, the effect is not restful.

"Did anyone bring a button-hook?"

"Lend me some powder."

"That's my safety-pin!"

"Where'd you put the burnt cork?"

"Is my hair a perfect sight?"

"Fasten me up--please!"

"Does my petticoat show?"

Everybody babbled at once, and nobody listened.

"I say, let's get out of this--I'm simply roasting!"

St. Laurence seized the Gypsies by the shoulder and shoved them into the vacant gallery. They squeezed themselves, with a sigh of relief, onto a shaky flight of six narrow stairs before the breezes of an open window.

"I know exactly what ails Jelly!" Patty spoke with the air of carrying on a conversation.

"What?" asked the others, with interest.

"She's had a quarrel with that Laurence Gilroy man who is manager at the electric light place. Don't you remember how he used to be hanging about all the time? And now he never comes at all? He was out every day in the Christmas vacation. They used to go walking together--and without any chaperone, too! You would think the Dowager would have made an awful fuss, but she didn't seem to. Anyway, you should have seen the way Miss Jellings treated that man--it was per-fect-ly dreadful! The way she jumps on Irene McCullough is nothing to the way she jumped on him."

"He doesn't have to work off demerits. He's a fool to stand it," said Conny simply.

"He doesn't stand it any more."

"How do you know?"

"Well, I--sort of heard. I was in the library alcove one day in the Christmas vacation, reading the 'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' when Jelly and Mr. Gilroy walked in. They didn't see me, and I didn't pay any attention to them at first--I'd just got to the place where the detective says, 'Is that the mark of a human hand?'--but pretty soon they got to scrapping so that I couldn't help but hear, and I felt sort of embarrassed about interrupting."

"What did they say?" asked Conny, impatiently brushing aside her apologies.

"I didn't grasp it entirely. He was trying to explain about something, and she wouldn't listen to a word he said--she was perfectly horrid. You know,--the way she is when she says, 'I understand it perfectly. I don't care to hear any excuse. You may take ten demerits, and report on Saturday for extra gymnasium.'--Well, they kept that up for fifteen minutes, both of 'em getting stiffer and stiffer. Then he took his hat and went. And you know, I don't believe he ever came back--I've never seen him. And now, she's sorry. She's been as cross as a bear ever since."

"And she can be awfully nice," said