“I wonder how a place like this apartment will look to her,” Beulah said thoughtfully. “I wonder if it will seem elegant, or cramped to death. I wonder if she will take to it kindly, or with an ill concealed contempt for its limitations.”

“The poor little thing will probably be so frightened and homesick by the time David gets her here, that she won’t know what kind of a place she’s arrived at,” Gertrude suggested. “Oh, I wouldn’t be in your shoes for the next few days for anything in the world, Beulah Page; would you, Margaret?”

The third girl in the group smiled.

“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully. “It would be rather fun to begin it.”

“I’d rather have her for the first two months, and get it over with,” Beulah said decisively. “It’ll be hanging over your head long after my ordeal is over, and by the time I have to have her again she’ll be absolutely in training. You don’t come until the fifth on the list you know, Gertrude. Jimmie has her after me, then Margaret, then Peter, and you, 15 and David, if he has got up the courage to tell his mother by that time.”

“But if he hasn’t,” Gertrude suggested.

“He can work it out for himself. He’s got to take the child two months like the rest of us. He’s agreed to.”

“He will,” Margaret said, “I’ve never known him to go back on his word yet.”

“Trust Margaret to stick up for David. Anyway, I’ve taken the precaution to put it in writing, as you know, and the document is filed.”

“We’re not adopting this infant legally.”

“No, Gertrude, we can’t,—yet, but morally we are. She isn’t an infant, she’s ten years old. I wish you girls would take the matter a little more seriously. We’ve bound ourselves to be responsible for this child’s whole future. We have undertaken her moral, social and religious education. Her body and soul are to be—”

“Equally divided among us,” Gertrude cut in.

Beulah scorned the interruption.

“—held sacredly in trust by the six of us, severally and collectively.”

“Why haven’t we adopted her legally then?” Margaret asked. 16

“Well, you see, there are practical objections. You have to be a corporation or an institution or something, to adopt a child as a group. A child can’t have three sets of parents in the eyes of the law, especially when none of them is married, or have the least intention of being married, to each other.—I don’t see what you want to keep laughing at, Gertrude. It’s all a little unusual and modern and that sort of thing, but I don’t think it’s funny. Do you, Margaret?”

“I think that it’s funny, but I think that it’s serious, too, Beulah.”

“I don’t see what’s funny about—” Beulah began hotly.

“You don’t see what’s funny about anything,—even Rogers College, do you, darling? It is funny though for the bunch of us to undertake the upbringing of a child ten years old; to make ourselves financially and spiritually responsible for it. It’s a lot more than funny, I know, but it doesn’t seem to me as if I could go on with it at all, until somebody was willing to admit what a scream the whole thing is.”

“We’ll admit that, if that’s all you want, won’t we, Beulah?” Margaret appealed.

“If I’ve got this insatiable sense of humor, let’s 17 indulge it by all means,” Gertrude laughed. “Go on, chillun, go on, I’ll try to be good now.”

“I wish you would,” Margaret said. “Confine yourself to a syncopated chortle while I get a few facts out of Beulah. I did most of my voting on this proposition by proxy, while I was having the measles in quarantine. Beulah, did I understand you to say you got hold of your victim through Mrs. O’Farrel, your seamstress?”

“Yes, when we decided we’d do this, we thought we’d get a child about six. We couldn’t have her any younger, because there would be bottles, and expert feeding, and well, you know, all those things. We couldn’t have done it, especially the boys. We thought six would be just about the right age, but we simply couldn’t find a child that would do. We had to know about its antecedents. We looked through the orphan asylums, but there wasn’t anything pure-blooded American that we could be sure of. We were all agreed that we wanted pure American blood. I knew Mrs. O’Farrel had relatives on Cape Cod. You know what that stock is, a good sea-faring strain, and a race of wonderfully fine women, ‘atavistic aristocrats’ I remember an author in the Atlantic Monthly called them once. I suppose 18 you think it’s funny to groan, Gertrude, when anybody makes a literary allusion, but it isn’t. Well, anyway, Mrs. O’Farrel knew about this child, and sent for her. She stayed with Mrs. O’Farrel over Sunday, and now David is bringing her here. She’ll be here in a minute.”

“Why David?” Gertrude twinkled.

“Why not David?” Beulah retorted. “It will be a good experience for him, besides David is so amusing when he tries to be, I thought he could divert her on the way.”

“It isn’t such a crazy idea, after all, Gertrude.” Margaret Hutchinson was the youngest of the three, being within several months of her majority, but she looked older. Her face had that look of wisdom that comes to the young who have suffered physical pain. “We’ve got to do something. We’re all too full of energy and spirits, at least the rest of you are, and I’m getting huskier every minute, to twirl our hands and do nothing. None of us ever wants to be married,—that’s settled; but we do want to be useful. We’re a united group of the closest kind of friends, bound by the ties of—of—natural selection, and we need a purpose in life. Gertrude’s a real artist, but the rest of us are not, and—and—” 19

“What could be more natural for us than to want the living clay to work on? That’s the idea, isn’t it?” Gertrude said. “I can be serious if I want to, Beulah-land, but, honestly, girls, when I come to face out the proposition, I’m almost afraid to. What’ll I do with that child when it comes to be my turn? What’ll Jimmie do? Buy her a string of pearls, and show her the night life of New York very likely. How’ll I break it to my mother? That’s the cheerful little echo in my thoughts night and day. How did you break it to yours, Beulah?”

Beulah flushed. Her serious brown eyes, deep brown with wine-colored lights in them, met those of each of her friends in turn. Then she laughed.

“Well, I do know this is funny,” she said, “but, you know, I haven’t dared tell her. She’ll be away for a month, anyway. Aunt Ann is here, but I’m only telling her that I’m having a little girl from the country to visit me.”

Occasionally the architect of an apartment on the upper west side of New York—by pure accident, it would seem, since the general run of such apartments is so uncomfortable, and unfriendly—hits upon a plan for a group of rooms that are at once graciously proportioned and charmingly convenient, 20 while not being an absolute offense to the eye in respect to the details of their decoration. Beulah Page and her mother lived in such an apartment, and they had managed with a few ancestral household gods, and a good many carefully related modern additions to them, to make of their eight rooms and bath, to say nothing of the ubiquitous butler’s-pantry, something very remarkably resembling a home, in its most delightful connotation: and it was in the drawing room of this home that the three girls were gathered.

Beulah, the younger daughter of a widowed mother—now visiting in the home of the elder daughter, Beulah’s sister Agatha, in the expectation of what the Victorians refer to as an “interesting event”—was technically under the chaperonage of her Aunt Ann, a solemn little spinster with no control whatever over the movements of her determined young niece.

Beulah was just out of college,—just out, in fact, of the most high-minded of all the colleges for women;—that founded by Andrew Rogers in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-one. There is probably a greater percentage of purposeful young women graduated from Rogers College every 21 year, than from any other one of the communities of learning devoted to the education of women; and of all the purposeful classes turned out from that admirable institution, Beulah’s class could without exaggeration be designated as the most purposeful class of them all. That Beulah was not the most purposeful member of her class merely argues that an almost abnormally high standard of purposefulness was maintained by practically every individual in it.

At Rogers every graduating class has its fad; its propaganda for a crusade against the most startling evils of the world. One year, the sacred outlines of the human figure are protected against disfigurement by an ardent group of young classicists in Grecian draperies. The next, a fierce young brood of vegetarians challenge a lethargic world to mortal combat over an Argentine sirloin. The year of Beulah’s graduation, the new theories of child culture that were gaining serious headway in academic circles, had filtered into the class rooms, and Beulah’s mates had contracted the contagion instantly. The entire senior class went mad on the subject of child psychology and the various scientific prescriptions for the direction of the young idea. 22

It was therefore primarily to Beulah Page, that little Eleanor Hamlin, of Colhassett, Massachusetts, owed the change in her fortune. At least it was to Beulah that she owed the initial inspiration that set the wheel of that fortune in motion; but it was to the glorious enterprise and idealism of youth, and the courage of a set of the most intrepid and quixotic convictions that ever quickened in the breasts of a mad half dozen youngsters, that she owed the actual fulfillment of her adventure.

The sound of the door-bell brought the three girls to their feet, but the footfalls in the corridor, double quick time, and accentuated, announced merely the arrival of Jimmie Sears, and Peter Stuyvesant, nicknamed Gramercy by common consent.

“Has she come?” Peter asked.

But Jimmie struck an attitude in the middle of the floor.

“My daughter, oh! my daughter,” he cried. “This suspense is killing me. For the love of Mike, children, where is she?”

“She’s coming,” Beulah answered; “David’s bringing her.”

Gertrude pushed him into the chaise-lounge 23 already in the possession of Margaret, and squeezed in between them.

“Hold my hand, Jimmie,” she said. “The feelings of a father are nothing,—nothing in comparison to those which smolder in the maternal breast. Look at Beulah, how white she is, and Margaret is trembling this minute.”

“I’m trembling, too,” Peter said, “or if I’m not trembling, I’m frightened.”

“We’re all frightened,” Margaret said, “but we’re game.”

The door-bell rang again.

“There they come,” Beulah said, “oh! everybody be good to me.”

The familiar figure of their good friend David appeared on the threshold at this instant, and beside him an odd-looking little figure in a shoddy cloth coat, and a faded blue tam-o’-shanter. There was a long smudge of dirt reaching from the corner of her eye well down into the middle of her cheek. A kind of composite gasp went up from the waiting group, a gasp of surprise, consternation, and panic. Not one of the five could have told at that instant what it was he expected to see, or how his imagination 24 of the child differed from the concrete reality, but amazement and keen disappointment constrained them. Here was no figure of romance and delight. No miniature Galatea half hewn out of the block of humanity, waiting for the chisel of a composite Pygmalion. Here was only a grubby, little unkempt child, like all other children, but not so presentable.

“What’s the matter with everybody?” said David with unnatural sharpness. “I want to present you to our ward, Miss Eleanor Hamlin, who has come a long way for the pleasure of meeting you. Eleanor, these are your cooperative parents.”

The child’s set gaze followed his gesture obediently. David took the little hand in his, and led the owner into the heart of the group. Beulah stepped forward.

“This is your Aunt Beulah, Eleanor, of whom I’ve been telling you.”

“I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Aunt Beulah,” the little girl said, as Beulah put out her hand, still uncertainly.

Then the five saw a strange thing happen. The immaculate, inscrutable David—the aristocrat of aristocrats, the one undemonstrative, super-self-conscious 25 member of the crowd, who had been delegated to transport the little orphan chiefly because the errand was so incongruous a mission on which to despatch him—David put his arm around the neck of the child with a quick protecting gesture, and then gathered her close in his arms, where she clung, quivering and sobbing, the unkempt curls straggling helplessly over his shoulder.

He strode across the room where Margaret was still sitting upright in the chaise-lounge, her dove-gray eyes wide, her lips parted.

“Here, you take her,” he said, without ceremony, and slipped his burden into her arms.

“Welcome to our city, Kiddo,” Jimmie said in his throat, but nobody heard him.

Peter, whose habit it was to walk up and down endlessly wherever he felt most at home, paused in his peregrination, as Margaret shyly gathered the rough little head to her bosom. The child met his gaze as he did so.

“We weren’t quite up to scratch,” he said gravely.

Beulah’s eyes filled. “Peter,” she said, “Peter, I didn’t mean to be—not to be—”

But Peter seemed not to know she was speaking. 26 The child’s eyes still held him, and he stood gazing down at her, his handsome head thrown slightly back; his face deeply intent; his eyes softened.

“I’m your Uncle Peter, Eleanor,” he said, and bent down till his lips touched her forehead.