“Whatever put such a curious notion into your head?” Mr. Bellows wanted to know.
“I may as well tell you,” the girl said bitterly. “You’ll be asked to sell me out soon. We’re going to lose everything we’ve got—Jimmy and I; the farm, the—furniture—everything.”
“You don’t say!” Mr. Bellows commented doubtfully. “Well, that had ought to net you something—eh?”
“We shan’t have anything; everything will be gone,” the girl said coldly.
“Sho! that’s too bad,” Mr. Bellows said good-naturedly. He stuck his thumbs into the arm-holes of his vest, and scowled absent-mindedly into space. Then he looked at Barbara again. “Mortgage—eh?” he suggested. “Coverin’ pretty much everythin’—eh?”
“Everything,” repeated Barbara, in a dull tone.
“Everythin’—save an’ exceptin’ one smart, willin’ young woman—eh? You’d ought to bring a purty good figger—in the right market.”
Mr. Bellows paused to give way to mirth once more.
“The matrimonial market’s the one partic’lar field I ain’t had much ’xperience in,” he concluded. “An’ auctionin’ off goods of the sort you mention ain’t ’xactly in my line, an’ that’s a fac’, miss. So I guess——”
“You don’t understand,” Barbara interrupted quickly. “Let me explain. When I found that everything was lost”—her voice trembled in spite of herself—“I thought at first I would teach school—let the farm go and teach——”
“Well, why don’t you do that?” Mr. Bellows inquired. He was a kind-hearted man, with sympathies somewhat blunted by his professional zeal in a calling which for the most part concerned itself with clearing away the wreckage of human hopes. “You’d make a right smart school-ma’am, I should say.”
“I’m not a normal school graduate,” Barbara told him. “Besides, they have no vacancies. Then I tried to get sewing to do. I can sew neatly. But I might easily starve on what I could earn with my needle. A woman told me she knew of someone who wanted—a—servant,” Barbara’s voice shook, but she went on bravely. “She said that people sometimes paid as much as twenty-five dollars a month for such work. And that it wasn’t easy to find women who could do that kind of work well. I said I would not work in another woman’s kitchen. But I—I am willing to do it, if I can sell my work for twelve hundred dollars.”