Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/81

 down on a stand, and herself sank down on the piano stool, her back towards the keys, staring at the lonesome looking room. How perfectly dead it did look. Marise could hear faintly in the distance an echo of the brisk voice of Jeanne and Isabelle, laughing and carrying on over the dishes. But in here, in the empty salon, there wasn't a sound. Her ears fairly rang with the nothingness all around her. Her heart was big and heavy.

At school that day, the girls had started up a new fad, the "wishbook." You got a little blank book, and then went around asking everybody to write down in it what she most wished to be. Marise was astonished at what the other girls wrote; one, "I wish I could be a great actress," another, "I wish I could marry a millionaire," another, "I wish I could be a great and holy saint." Marise had not been able to understand why everybody did not write what she did, instantly, instantly, something she had always known she wanted. What she had written in everybody's book was, "I wish I could be happy." She thought of this now, and in the empty, cold, echoing room cried it aloud, "I wish I could be happy."

There was no answer from the stiff stuffed chairs, from the well-polished tables, from the black hole of the fireplace. Marise had expected no answer, would not have expected one if her parents had been there, never expected one. What answer could Father give. Father who apparently never thought of such a thing as being happy, and never hoped for anything more than to be a little less tired and bored. And if Maman had been there, she wouldn't even have heard what Marise said, busy as she always was with thinking something of her own. Maman wasn't nearly so cheerful as she had been. What was it Maman was thinking about when she sat so still and her face got dark and drawn? Certainly not about Marise.

The little girl sat on the piano stool, dangling her long legs and looking straight ahead into the empty room, which looked back at her, she thought, as though it had a low opinion of her and a very high opinion of its own importance and elegance. She knew she ought to get up and go into her own room and study a very long lesson on the reign of Henri IV. But she couldn't seem to get up the strength to do this, sitting