Page:Charlotte Teller - The Cage (1907).djvu/18

THE CAGE was sixteen, with tousled hair and bare throat. As she looked across at the Hartwell porch and saw Anne Forester ironing, she was impressed as usual by the appearance of Anne, whose dress was without smudge or wrinkle, whose face was without line of worry, and whose hair waved upward into the knot on the top of a well-shaped head. Maggie's admiration of this woman, twice her age and more, was that of a child for a princess in a fairy tale. At any moment Maggie expected to see white horses and carriage dash up into the alley gate and carry the princess off to that mysterious land uptown where she really belonged. But there she stood in front of the ironing board, one end of which was on a barrel and the other on the back of a chair, and there was the basket of sprinkled clothes in the battered easy-chair near the ice box.

"It's awful hot, isn't it?" Maggie called across.

"But this has to be done," answered Anne. She was always hoping to encourage the Flanagans to greater domestic endeavor.

"We don't iron; we just wash in hot weather," answered Maggie, " and we don't wash more'n we have to."

Anne was wondering what to say to impress her.

"Say, Miss Annie," said Maggie, " I saw your sister to-day in a carriage. She looked just grand."

Anne knit her brows.

"Just grand," repeated Maggie. She had a white parasol. I pointed her out to one of the girls, and she was awful surprised. She wanted to know why you lived over here on the West Side when your sister was such a swell. She said perhaps you were disinherited. I told her it wasn't that because you never had any fellows hanging around——" 8