The Collected Works of Susan Coolidge: 7 Novels, 35+ Short Stories, Essays & Poems (Illustrated). Susan CoolidgeЧитать онлайн книгу.
painted in soft purples and grays, and among the poppies and silver lilies which wreathed it appeared a cunning little downy bird, fast asleep, with his head under his wing. The morning text, “When I awake, I am still with Thee,” was in bright colors, scarlet and blue and gold, and had a frame of rose garlands and wide-awake-looking butterflies and humming-birds. The girls thought they had never seen any thing so pretty.
Such a gay supper as they had that night! Katy would not take her old place at the tea-tray. She wanted to know how Elsie looked as housekeeper, she said. So she sat on one side of papa, and Clover on the other, and Elsie poured the tea, with a mixture of delight and dignity which was worth seeing.
“I’ll begin to-morrow,” said Katy.
And with that morrow, when she came out of her pretty room and took her place once more as manager of the household, her grown-up life may be said to have begun. So it is time that I should cease to write about her. Grown-up lives may be very interesting, but they have no rightful place in a child’s book. If little girls will forget to be little, and take it upon them to become young ladies, they must bear the consequences, one of which is, that we can follow their fortunes no longer.
… … … … .
I wrote these last words sitting in the same green meadow where the first words of “What Katy Did” were written. A year had passed, but a cardinal-flower which seemed the same stood looking at itself in the brook, and from the bulrush-bed sounded tiny voices. My little goggle-eyed friends were discussing Katy and her conduct, as they did then, but with less spirit; for one voice came seldom and faintly, while the other, bold and defiant as ever, repeated over and over again, “Katy didn’t! Katy didn’t! She didn’t, didn’t, didn’t”
“Katy did!” sounded faintly from the farther rush.
“She didn’t, she didn’t,” chirped the undaunted partisan. Silence followed. His opponent was either convinced or tired of the discussion.
“Katy didn’t.” The words repeated themselves in my mind as I walked homeward. How much room for “Didn’ts” there is in the world, I thought What an important part they play! And how glad I am that, with all her own and other people’s doings, so many of these “Didn’ts” were included among the things which my Katy did at School!
What Katy Did Next
Chapter I. An Unexpected Guest
Chapter IV. On the “Spartacus”
Chapter VI. Across the Channel
Chapter VII. The Pension Suisse
Chapter VIII. On the Track of Ulysses
Chapter X. Clear Shining After Rain
This Story is Dedicated
TO
THE MANY LITTLE GIRLS
(SOME OF THEM GROWN TO BE GREAT GIRLS NOW),
Who, during the last twelve years, have begged that something more might be told them about KATY CARR, and what she did after leaving school.
Chapter I.
An Unexpected Guest
The September sun was glinting cheerfully into a pretty bedroom furnished with blue. It danced on the glossy hair and bright eyes of two girls, who sat together hemming ruffles for a white muslin dress. The half-finished skirt of the dress lay on the bed; and as each crisp ruffle was completed, the girls added it to the snowy heap, which looked like a drift of transparent clouds or a pile of foamy white-of-egg beaten stiff enough to stand alone.
These girls were Clover and Elsie Carr, and it was Clover’s first evening dress for which they were hemming ruffles. It was nearly two years since a certain visit made by Johnnie to Inches Mills, of which some of you have read in “Nine Little Goslings;” and more than three since Clover and Katy had returned home from the boarding-school at Hillsover.
Clover was now eighteen. She was a very small Clover still, but it would have been hard to find anywhere a prettier little maiden than she had grown to be. Her skin was so exquisitely fair that her arms and wrists and shoulders, which were round and dimpled like a baby’s, seemed cut out of daisies or white rose leaves. Her thick, brown hair waved and coiled gracefully about her head. Her smile was peculiarly sweet; and the eyes, always Clover’s chief beauty, had still that pathetic look which made them irresistible to tender-hearted people.
Elsie, who adored Clover, considered her as beautiful as girls in books, and was proud to be permitted to hem ruffles for the dress in which she was to burst upon the world. Though, as for that, not much “bursting” was possible in Burnet, where tea-parties of a middle-aged description, and now and then a mild little dance, represented “gayety” and “society.” Girls “came out” very much, as the sun comes out in the morning,—by slow degrees and gradual approaches, with no particular one moment which could be fixed upon as having been the crisis of the joyful event.
“There,” said Elsie, adding another ruffle to the pile on the bed,—“there’s the fifth done. It’s going to be ever so pretty, I think. I’m glad you had it all white; it’s a great deal nicer.”
“Cecy wanted me to have a blue bodice and sash,” said Clover, “but I wouldn’t. Then she tried to persuade me to get a long spray of pink roses for the skirt.”
“I’m so glad you didn’t! Cecy was always crazy about pink roses. I only wonder she didn’t wear them when she was married!”
Yes; the excellent Cecy, who at thirteen had announced her intention to devote her whole life to teaching Sunday School, visiting the poor, and setting a good example to her more worldly contemporaries, had actually forgotten these fine resolutions, and before she was twenty had become the wife of Sylvester Slack, a young lawyer in a neighboring town! Cecy’s wedding and wedding-clothes, and Cecy’s house-furnishing had been the great excitement of the preceding year in Burnet; and a fresh excitement had come since in the shape of Cecy’s baby, now about two months old, and named “Katherine Clover,” after her two friends. This made it natural that Cecy and her affairs should still be of interest in the Carr household; and Johnnie, at the time we write of, was making her a week’s visit.
“She was rather