Re-Creations Read Online Free PDF

and pans somewhere in the near distance that Cornelia finally awakened with a sense of terrible depression and a belated idea that she ought to be doing something for the family comfort. She arose hastily and dressed with a growing distaste for the new day and what was before her. Even the view from the grimy little bedroom window was discouraging. It was a gray day, and one could see there were intentions of rain in the messy clouds that hurled themselves across the distant rooftops. The window looked out into the backyard, a small enclosure with a fence needing paint and dishearteningly full of rusty tin cans and old weather-stained newspapers and trash. Beyond the narrow, dirty alley were rows of other similar backyards, with now and then a fluttering dishcloth hanging on a string on a back porch and plenty of heaped-up ash cans everywhere you looked. They were the back doors of houses of the poorer class, most of them two-story and old. Farther on there was an excellent view of a large dump in a wide, cavernous lot that looked as if it had suffered from an earthquake sometime in the dim past and lost its bottom, so enormous it seemed as its steep sides sloped down, liberally coated with “dump.” Cornelia gave a slight shiver of horror and turned from the window. To think of having to look at a view like that all summer. A vision of the cool, leafy camp where she had spent two weeks the summer before floated tanta-lizingly before her sad eyes as she slowly went downstairs.
    It was a plaintive little voice that arrested her attention and her progress halfway down, a sweet, tired young voice that went to her heart, coming from the open kitchen door and carrying straight through the open dining room and through the hall up to her.
    “I guess she doesn’t realize how much we needed her,” it said sadly. “And I guess she’s pretty disappointed at the house and everything. It’s pretty much of a change from college, of course.”
    Then a young, indignant high-tenor growl:
    “Hm! What does she think she is, anyway? Some queen? I guess the house has been good enough for us. How does she think we’ve stood being poor all these years just to keep her in college? I’d like to know. This house isn’t so much worse’n the last one we were in. It’s a peach beside some we might have had to take if these folks hadn’t been just moving out now. What does she want to do anyhow? Isn’t her family good enough for her, or what? If I ever have any children, I shan’t send ‘em to college, I know that. It spoils ‘em. And I don’t guess I’ll ever go myself. What’s her little old idea, anyway? Who crowned her?”
    “Why, she wants to be an interior decorator,” said the little sister, slowly hanging up the dishcloth. “I guess it’s all right, and she’d make money and all, only we just couldn’t help her out till she got through her course.”
    “Interior decorator!” scornfully said the boy. “I’d be satisfied if she’d decorate my interior a little. I’d like some of Mother’s waffles, wouldn’t you? And some hash and Johnnycake. Gee! Well, I guess we better get a hustle on, or we’ll be called down for tardiness. You gotta wake her up before you go?”
    “Father said not to; I’m just going to leave a note. It’s all written there on the dining room table. You put some coal on the range, and I’ll get my hat and coat,” and the little sister moved quickly toward the hall.
    Cornelia in sudden panic turned silently and sped back to her room, closing the door and listening with wildly beating heart till her young brother and sister went out the door and closed it behind them. Then, obeying an impulse that she did not understand, she suddenly flung her door open and flew to her father’s front bedroom window for a sight of them as they trudged off with piles of books under their arms, two valiant young comrades, just as she and Carey used to be in years so long ago and far away that she had almost