Read Online Francie Comes Home by Emily Hahn - Free Book Online Page B

over the bags when Florence Ryan emerged from the office and greeted the stranger like an old friend.
    â€œAnne! My dear, this isn’t like you,” she said. Francie thought the remark mysterious, but the customer laughed a little, as if she understood.
    â€œNo, it isn’t, is it? But I do need a basket—right now—and I thought you might, just once, have something useful.”
    â€œI don’t know as I ought to sell anything to you. You’re a naughty girl,” said Mrs. Ryan, continuing in a jocular, scolding vein. “I do think I might have what you want, though. Francie dear, please run down and bring up that Spanish basket for Mrs. Clark.”
    The Spanish basket was very pretty and simple—one that Francie would never have thought of as suiting a woman who admired gilded china shoes. She wondered a little as she ran down to the storeroom to get it. But she decided Mrs. Ryan ought to know her own clientele, and as it turned out, she did; Mrs. Clark pounced on the basket and bought it immediately. The two older women chatted a considerable time before she took her leave: Francie, waiting impatiently for permission to lock up and go home, reflected, not for the first time, that her elders and betters had an infinite capacity for vapid conversation. Committee meetings. Personalities. Television. Housekeeping problems. One hardly ever heard them discuss exciting things like plays or books or concerts. Of course, one didn’t get many plays or concerts in the flash in Jefferson, but after all it wasn’t terribly far from Chicago, and there was radio and TV, though you’d never think, to hear Jefferson people talking, that TV carried any program except giveaways and “I Love Lucy.” Still, who was Francie Nelson to put on airs about the town? How was she spending her time, anyway—was she reading good books or listening to Beethoven on the Sunday radio? Not at all. She had puttered about with her paints over the weekends, but she was discovering gradually that what she wanted most was to paint for something. Stage sets, or fabrics, maybe; objects even more tangible than a painting. How could that be done in Jefferson?
    And she was going around rather too much, if the truth were told, with Marty Jenner’s set. She was dancing to juke-box music in joints, and wasting time over Cokes, accepting the kids’ admiration, even depending on it. She was in danger of becoming known, God help her, as their leader. At her age, too! And yet, she thought with quick defensiveness, what else was there to do, placed as she was? If Jefferson didn’t like her choice of company (not that anybody had hinted at criticism except maybe Cousin Biddy) they should find her more fitting companions. Everybody her age was either away, like Glenn, or settled down and dull like Ruth.
    â€œSomeday I’ll be an institution in the town,” she thought glumly. “Pete and Marty and Jinx will go away or marry, and then there’ll be another younger gang that can take me up. I’ll be known as that woman who won’t act her age. Either that, or I’ll turn into somebody like this Mrs. Clark, drifting around in gift shops, buying iron dachshunds and trick lamps.”
    Her eyes followed the quiet figure when Mrs. Clark at last took her leave and the women in the shop were free to start locking up. Mrs. Clark somehow seemed to her to epitomize the drab future; she was not the more likable for that. Francie felt an almost unpleasant emotion about her. It would have been different, she admitted, if she’d been able to look forward to an exciting date with Glenn that evening. She slid a cabinet door shut with a bang. Or if she had a date with a man who had a profile like Marlon Brando’s. But what was the use? She didn’t. Probably she never would have an exciting date, ever again.
    It was a waste of time to read the local news in the paper at breakfast, but