Every Soul Hath Its Song Part 23

"Clean sheets, mamma?"

"Yes; and don't muss up the linen-shelfs."

Her daughter flitted down a narrow aisle of hallway; from the shoulders her thin, flowing sleeves floated backward, filmy, white.

Mrs. Shongut flung open the screen door and swept a pile of webby dust to the porch and then off on the patch of gra.s.s.

Thin spring suns.h.i.+ne lay warm along the neat terraces of Wa.s.serman Avenue. Windows were flung wide to the fresh kiss of spring; pillows, comforters, and rugs draped across their sills. Across the street a negro, with an old gunny-sack tied ap.r.o.n-fas.h.i.+on about his loins, turned a garden hose on a stretch of asphalt and swept away the flood with his broom. A woman, whose hair caught the sunlight like copper, avoided the flood and tilted a perambulator on its two rear wheels down the wooden steps of her veranda.

Across the dividing rail of the Shonguts' porch a child with a strap of school-books flung over one shoulder ran down the soft terrace, and a woman emerged after her to the topmost step of the veranda, holding her checked ap.r.o.n up about her waist and s.h.i.+elding her eyes with one hand.

"Jeannie! Jean-nie!"

"Yes'm."

"Watch out for the street-car crossing, Jeannie."

"Yes'm."

"Jean-nie!"

"What?"

"Be sure!"

"Yeh."

"Good morning, Mrs. Shongut."

"Good morning, Mrs. Lissman. Looks like spring!"

"Ain't it so? I say to Mr. Lissman this morning, before he went down-town, that he should bring home some gra.s.s seed to-night."

"Ya, ya! Before you know it now, we got hot summer after such a late spring."

"I say to my Roscoe that after school to-day he should bring up the rubber-plant out of the cellar."

"That's right; use 'em while they're young, Mrs. Lissman. When they grow up it's different."

"Mrs. Shongut, you should talk! Only last night I says to my husband, I says, when I seen Miss Renie pa.s.s by, 'Such a pretty girl!' I tell you, Mrs. Shongut, such a pretty girl and such a fine-looking boy you can be proud of."

"Ach, Mrs. Lissman, you think so?"

"There ain't one on the street any prettier than Miss Renie. 'I tell you, if my Roscoe was ten years older she could have him,' I says to my husband."

Mrs. Shongut leaned forward on her broom-handle. "If I say so myself, Mrs. Lissman, I got good reasons to have pleasure out of my children.

I guess you heard, Mrs. Lissman, what a grand position my Izzy has got with his uncle, of the Isadore Flexner Banking-house. Bookkeeping in a banking-house, Mrs. Lissman, for a boy like Izzy!"

"I tell you, Mrs. Shongut, if you got rich relations it's a help."

"How grand my brother has done for himself, Mrs. Lissman! Such a house he has built on Kingston Place! Such a home! You can see for yourself, Mrs. Lissman, how his wife and daughters drive up sometimes in their automobile."

"I'm surprised they don't come more often, Mrs. Shongut; your Renie and them girls, I guess, are grand friends."

"Ya; and to be in that banking-house is a grand start for my boy. I always say it can lead to almost anything. Only I tell him he shouldn't let fine company make him wild."

"Ach, boys will be boys, Mrs. Shongut. Even now it ain't so easy for me to get make my Roscoe to come in off his roller-skates at night. My Jeannie I can make mind; but I tell her when she is old enough to have beaus, then our troubles begin with her."

Mrs. Shongut's voice dropped into her throat in the guise of a whisper.

"Some time, Mrs. Lissman, when my Renie ain't home, I want you should come over and I read you some of the letters that girl gets from young men. So mad she always gets at me if she knows I talk about them."

"Mrs. Shongut, you'll laugh when I tell you; but already in the school my Jeannie gets little notes what the little boys write to her. Mad it makes me like anything; but what can you do when you got a pretty girl?"

"A young man in Peoria, Mrs. Lissman, such beautiful letters he writes Renie, never in my life did I read. Such language, Mrs. Lissman; just like out of a song-book! Not a time my Renie goes out that I don't go right to her desk to read 'em--that's how beautiful he writes. In Green Springs she met him."

"Ain't it a pleasure, Mrs. Shongut, to have grand letters like that?

Even with my little Jeannie, though it makes me so mad, still I--"

"But do you think my Renie will have any of them? 'Not,' she says, 'if they was lined in gold.'"

"I guess she got plenty beaus. Say, I ain't so blind that I don't see Sollie Spitz on your porch every--"

"Sollie Spitz! Ach, Mrs. Lissman, believe me, there's nothing to that!

My Renie since a little child likes reading and writing like he does.

I tell her papa we made a mistake not to keep her in school like she wanted."

"My Jeannie--"

"She loves learning, that girl. Under her pillow yesterday I found a book of verses about flowers. Where she gets such a mind, Mrs. Lissman, I don't know. But Sollie Spitz! Say, we don't want no poets in the family."

"I should say not! But I guess she gets all the good chances she wants."

"And more. A young man from Cincinnati--if I tell you his name, right away you know him--twice her papa brought him out to supper after they had business down-town together--only twice; and now every week he sends her five pounds--"

"Just think!"

"And such roses, Mrs. Lissman! You seen for yourself when I sent you one the other day. Right in his own hothouse he grows 'em, Mrs. Lissman."

"Just think!"

"If I tell you his name, Mrs. Lissman, right away you know his firm. In Cincinnati they say he's got the finest house up on the hill--musical chairs, that play when you sit on 'em. Twice every week he sends her--"

"Grand!"

"'I tell you,' I says to her papa, 'her cousins over in Kingston Place got tickets to take the young men to theaters with and automobiles to ride them round in; but, if I say so myself, not one of them has better chances than my Renie, right here in our little flat.'"

Mrs. Lissman folded her arms in a shelf across her bosom and leaned her ample uncorseted figure against the railing. "I give you right, Mrs.

Shongut. Look at Jeannette Bamberger, over on Kingston; every night when me and Mr. Lissman used to walk past last summer, right on her grand front porch that girl sat alone, like she was glued."