Re-Creations by Grace Livingston Hill Read Free Book Online Page A

upset our plans again,” he said. “I’m awfully sorry, Mother, but Brown is coming on from Boston expecting to meet me at noon, and I guess there’s nothing to do but wait until the two o’clock train. Shall you mind very much?”
    “Not at all,” said his mother, smiling. “Why should I mind? I came on to be with you. Does it matter whether I’m in Philadelphia or Washington?”
    “Is there anything you would like to do this morning? Any shopping? Or would you like to drive about a bit?”
    She shook her head.
    “I can shop at home. I came here to be with you.”
    “Then let’s drive,” he decided with a loving smile. “Where would you like to go? Anything you want to see?”
    “No—or wait. Yes, there is. I’ve a notion I’d like to drive past the house where that little girl I met on the train lives. I’d like to see exactly what she’s up against with her firm little chin and her clear, wise eyes and her artistic ways.”
    “At it again, aren’t you, Mother? Always falling in love and chasing after your object. You’re worse than a young man in his teens.” He smiled understandingly. “All right. We’ll hunt her up, Mother, only we shan’t have much time to stop, for I have to be here sharp at twelve thirty. Do you know where she lives?”
    “Yes, I have her address here,” said his mother, searching in her silver bag for the card on which Cornelia had written it. “But I don’t want to stop. It wouldn’t do. She would think me intruding.”
    The young man took the address and ordered a taxicab, and five minutes after Cornelia entered the door of her home with her arms full of bundles from the market and grocery, a taxicab crawled slowly by the house, and two pairs of eyes eagerly scanned the high, narrow, weather-stained building, with its number over the front door the only really distinct thing about it.
    “The poor child!” murmured the lady.
    “Well, she sure is up against it!” growled the son, sitting back with an air of not looking but taking it all in out of the tail end of his eye the way young men can do.
    “And she wants to be an interior decorator!” said the mother, turning from her last look out the little window behind.
    “She’s got some task this time, I’ll say!” answered the son. “It may show up more promisingly from the interior, but I doubt it. And you say she’s been to college? Dwight Hall, didn’t you say, where Dorothy Mayo graduated? Some comedown! It’s a hard world. Well, Mother, I guess we’ve got to get back or I’ll miss my appointment,” and he gave the chauffeur directions to turn about.
    More rapidly they passed this time, but the eyes of the woman took in all the details: the blank sidewall where windows ought to have abounded; the shallow third story obviously with space for only one room; the lowly neighbors; the dirty, noisy children in the street. She thought of the girl’s lovely refined face and sighed.
    “One might, of course, do a great deal of good in such a neighborhood. It is an opportunity,” she murmured thoughtfully.
    Her son looked amused.
    “I imagine she’ll confine her attention to the interior of her own home if she does anything at all. I’m afraid if I came home from college to a place like that, I’d beat it, mother mine.”
    His mother looked up with a trusting smile.
    “You wouldn’t, though!” she said sunnily and added thoughtfully, “And she won’t either. She had a true face. Sometime I’m coming back to see how it came out.”

    Meantime, Cornelia in the kitchen started the fire up brightly, put on the teakettle, and began to concoct a soft gingerbread with the aid of the nice thick sour milk. When it was in the oven, she hunted out her mother’s old worn bread raiser, greased the squeaking handle with butter, and started some bread. She remembered how everybody in the family loved Mother’s homemade bread, and if there was one thing above another in which she had excelled as a little girl in