The Girl Who Had Nothing

								

"brat" to the poorhouse.  But the child was in her seventh year and
beginning to be useful.  She liked running up and downstairs to answer
the lodgers’ bells, which saved steps for the two overworked servants;
and, of course, when she became a financial burden instead of the means
of lightening burdens, it was discovered that she could do many other
things with equal ease and propriety.  She could clean boots and knives,
wash dishes, help make beds, and carry trays; she could also be slapped
for misdeeds of her own and those of others, an act which afforded
invariable relief to the landlady’s feelings.  As years went on, further
spheres of usefulness opened, especially after the Boyle baby came; one
servant could be kept instead of two; and taking everything into
consideration, Joan’s hostess decided to continue her charity.
Therefore, the child could have answered the conundrum, "When is a home
not a home?" out of the stores of her intimate experience.
In the third place, she had only run away as far as one of the shelters
on the Marine Parade; she had brought the landlady’s baby with her, and,
lurking grimly in the recesses of her mind, she had the virtuous
intention of going home again when Minnie should be hungry enough to
cry, at tea-time.
Joan was telling the two-year-old Minnie a fairy story, made up out of
her own head, all about a gorgeous princess, and founded on the
adventures she herself would best like to have, when, just as the
narrative was working towards an exciting climax, a girl of Joan’s own
age came in sight, walking with her governess.
The story broke off short between Joan’s little white teeth, which
suddenly shut together with a click.  This did not signify much, as far
as the Boyle baby was concerned, for Joan unconsciously wove fairy tales
more for her own pleasure than that of her companion, and as a matter of
fact the warmth of the afternoon sunshine had acted as "juice of poppy
and mandragora" upon Minnie’s brain.  Her small, primrose-yellow head
was nodding, and she was unaware that the story had ended abruptly just
as the princess was beguiling the dragon, and that a girl almost as fine
as the princess herself was approaching.
The new-comer was about twelve or thirteen, and she was more exquisitely
dressed than any child Joan remembered to have met.  Perhaps, if the
apparition had been a good deal younger or older, the lodging-house
drudge would not have observed so keenly, or realised with a quick stab
of passionate pain the illimitable gulf dividing lives.  But here was a
girl of her own age, her own height, her own needs and capacities, and
yet--the difference!
It struck her like a thrust of some thin, delicate surgical instrument
which could inflict anguish, yet leave no trace.  Joan’s whole life was
spent in dreaming; without the dreams, existence at 12, Seafoam Terrace
would not have been tolerable to a young creature with the nerves of a