Going to the kitchen, she stood before the mantel-shelf looking at the fox, as if at an oracle that must one day speak to her. Then something cool seemed to touch her brain, clearing it and crystallizing her thoughts, as it had that night when the plan of coming to the homestead drove away the oppression of despair itself.
“Yes,” she said aloud, “to win money it must be the best of its kind. What can I do that is the best?—paint animals? by and by perhaps—but for daily bread this spring? Ah, it has come! I can make sandwiches, all kinds, of the very best (how the Hendersons and Bleeckers gobbled them up), to go with mother’s tea, also the bread for them! I will make the summer drink of ginger ale, ice, a lemon slice, and three sprigs of mint, that father once said tasted so much better than the ginger-root affair they bottle for sale. I will play I am Great-granny West, swing out my sign, and ‘accommodate wayfarers’—that is, the pleasure drivers between Stonebridge and Gordon—with food and drink, as Mrs. Fenton put it! She says a day never passes from May to November but what people in driving stop, and beg to buy even bread and milk. Grandma West’s sign was a fox and a goose, but to-day geese are out of the running. My sign shall be only the Sign of the Fox. You shall hang out over the gate on the old pine in an iron frame, and talk wisely to the passers-by,” she said, looking up at the picture.
Then, taking the bread-board down from the shelf, she kissed the fox on the nose in the fervour of hope that was dawning.
“Instead of cakes and ale, or anything like that, you shall have just one word—tea—painted over you, and we will leave them to guess the rest,” and Brooke, who was in a mood to declare that the wise beast winked, and licked his lips, needs must laugh at the curious yet satisfactory blending of her dreams of the future, love, painting, and fame, with the eternal everyday theme, bread and butter!
After a moment the revulsion came. What would her mother say? That passed away in the thought that she could not object, for to act untrammelled was unquestionably the first link in the chain by which Brooke was to endeavour to keep the family bound together. Yet it was a relief when, an hour later, the plan had been thoroughly discussed and formulated, to find that her mother not only fully approved, but was already on the alert, and full of suggestions to make the simple service as dainty as might be.