Josie also attached herself to Lorraine, who read her poems and made her fudge galore. She told Lorraine her troubles, that a girl with brains, and particularly a girl with literary ability, was never popular with boys; they wanted silly, little wasp-waisted dolls and she was just too hurt for words—so there.
Lorraine was also sorry for Josie and she let her ravage her sugar barrel and pile on to her best chaise longue to lie and pout and eat candy, trying to find a new word to rhyme with “death.”
The other offender was Dan’s own stenographer, Hazel Mitchell. Dan, who looked upon the world with a larger vision than did most of the Corners, had a contempt and lack of interest in Lorraine’s “grafters.” Had he loved Lorraine as he had loved Thurley there would have been many a battle on the subject until he had shown Lorraine the broader vision and comprehension. As it was, he was content to let well enough alone, unless he was called upon to entertain the “grafters” and endure their chatter.
Hazel Mitchell was a slender, wan-eyed girl—“moon face” was Dan’s considerate name for her. She was, so he said, eternally recombing her hair when he wanted to give some dictation and always feeling whether or not her waist and skirt were properly interlocked, or running off to visit the male clerk in the men’s furnishings or “just slipping” up to Owen Pringle’s shoppe to try on a new hat!
Hazel operated her actions on the theory that “pity is akin to love” and if she could make every one sufficiently sorry for her the day was won. This she managed to do with less consideration for the truth and the common sense of her audience than one might have suspected.
“Oh, I never listen to her yarns,” Dan told Lorraine, when Lorraine asked if he did not feel sorry for Hazel who had a brutal, drunken father and whose mother with eight children younger than Hazel never had a kind word for the girl, but expected her to come right straight home from work and start tending the babies. “If there was any one else in this town I could hire, I’d do it without hesitation. But if I let her go, Josie Donaldson would want the place or else Cora Spooner, and Hazel is a mild sort of fool. How can she cry all the time and not get granulated lids?” he ended irritably. “She blots her dictation pad for fair.”