Just Patty by Jean Webster (best romance ebooks txt) 📗

burst into Patty Wyatt's room one evening in a state of wide-eyed amazement.

"What do you think?" she cried. "Kid McCoy says she's going to be a lady!"

"A what?" Patty emerged from the bath towel with which she had been polishing her face.

"A lady. She's sitting down now, running pale blue baby ribbon through the embroidery in her night gown."

"What's happened to her?" was Patty's question.

"She's been reading a book that Mae Mertelle brought back."

Rosalie settled herself, Turk fashion, on the window seat, disposed the folds of her pink kimono in graceful billows about her knees, and allowed two braids of curly yellow hair to hang picturesquely over her shoulders. She was ready for bed and could extend her call until the last stroke of the "Lights-out" bell.

"What kind of a book?" asked Patty with a slightly perfunctory note in her voice.

Rosalie was apt to burst into one's room with a startling announcement and then, having engaged everybody's attention, settle down to an endless, meandering recital sprinkled with anti-climaxes.

"It's about a sweet young English girl whose father owned a tea estate in Asia--or maybe Africa. But anyway, where it was hot, and there were a lot of natives and snakes and centipedes. Her mother died and she was sent back home to boarding-school when she was a tiny little thing. Her father was quite bad. He drank and swore and smoked. The only thing that kept him from being awfully bad, was the thought of his sweet little golden-haired daughter in England."

"Well, what of it?" Patty inquired, politely suppressing a yawn. Rosalie had a way of trailing off into golden-haired sentiment if one didn't haul her up sharp.

"Just wait! I'm coming to it. When she was seventeen she went back to India to take care of her father, but almost right off he got a sunstroke and died. And in his death-bed he entrusted Rosamond--that was her name--to his best friend to finish bringing up. So when Rosamond went to live with her guardian, and took charge of his bungalow and made it beautiful and homelike and comfortable--she wouldn't let him drink or smoke or swear any more. And as he looked back over the past--"

"He was eaten with remorse at the thought of the wasted years," Patty glibly supplied, "and wished that he had lived so as to be more worthy of the sweet, womanly influence that had come into his wicked life."

"You've read it!" said Rosalie.

"Not that I know of," said Patty.

"Anyway," said Rosalie, with an air of challenge, "they fell in love and were married--"

"And her father and mother, looking down from heaven, smiled a blessing on the dear little daughter who had brought so much happiness to a lonely heart?"

"Um--yes," agreed Rosalie, doubtfully.

There was no amount of sentiment that she would not swallow, but she knew from mortifying experience that Patty was not equally voracious.

"It's a very touching story," Patty commented, "but where does Kid McCoy come in?"

"Why, don't you see?" Rosalie's violet eyes were big with interest. "It's exactly Kid's own story! I realized it the minute I saw the book, and I had the awfulest time making her read it. She made fun of it at first, but after she'd really got into it, she appreciated the resemblance. She says now it was the Hand of Fate."

"Kid's story? What are you talking about?" Patty was commencing to be interested.

"Kid has a wicked English guardian just like the Rosamond in the book. Anyway, he's English, and she thinks probably he's wicked. Most ranchmen are. He lives all alone with only cow-punchers for companions, and he needs a sweet womanly influence in his home. So Kid's decided to be a lady, and go back and marry Guardie, and make him happy for the rest of his life."

Patty laid herself on the bed and rolled in glee. Rosalie rose and regarded her with a touch of asperity.

"I don't see anything so funny--I think it's very romantic."

"Kid exerting a sweet womanly influence!" Patty gurgled. "She can't even pretend she's a lady for an hour. If you think she can stay one--"

"Love," pronounced Rosalie, "has accomplished greater wonders than that--you wait and see."

And the school did see. Kid McCoy's reformation became the sensation of the year. The teachers attributed the felicitous change in her deportment to the good influence of Rosalie, and though they were extremely relieved, they did not expect it to last. But week followed week, and it did last.

Kid McCoy no longer answered to "Kid." She requested her friends to call her "Margarite." She dropped slang and learned to embroider; she sat through European Travel and Art History nights with clasped hands and a sweetly pensive air, where she used to drive her neighbors wild by a solid hour of squirming. Voluntarily, she set herself to practising scales. The reason she confided to Rosalie, and Rosalie to the rest of the school.

They needed the softening influence of music on the ranch. One-eyed Joe played the accordion, and that was all the music they had. The school saw visions of the transformed Margarite, dressed in white, sitting before the piano in the twilight singing softly the "Rosary," while Guardie watched her with folded arms; and the cowboys, with bowie knives sheathed in their boots, and lariats peacefully coiled over their shoulders, gathered by the open window.

Lenten services that year, instead of being forcibly endured by a rebellious Kid, were attended by a sweetly reverent Margarite. The entire school felt an electric thrill at sight of Miss McCoy walking up the aisle with downcast eyes, and hands demurely clasping her prayer book. Usually she looked as much in place in the stained-glass atmosphere of Trinity Chapel as an unbroken broncho colt.

This amazing reform continued for seven weeks. The school was almost beginning to forget that there was ever a time when Kid McCoy was not a lady.

Then one day a letter came from Guardie with the news that he was coming East to visit his little girl. Subdued excitement