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A travelling merchant, one of the kind that goes about with a huge pack on his back, had found his way to the Ashdales, and on seeing Glory Goldie in all the glow and freshness of her youth he had taken from his pack a piece of dress goods which he tried to induce her parents to buy for her. The cloth was a changeable red, of a texture almost like satin and as costly as it was beautiful.
Glory Goldie, seeing that her mother looked troubled, asked her if she was afraid of the water, and tried to assure her there was no danger, although it was so windy that one could hardly keep one's footing on the pier. Glory Goldie was accustomed to seafaring and knew what she was talking about. "These are no waves," she said to her mother.
Glory Goldie went red as a beet and her eyes filled up. The teacher rapped on the floor with the end of his pointer and shouted "Silence!" Whereupon he said a few words to explain the matter. "It was Father Glory Goldie wanted to say, of course, but said Jan instead because her own father's name is Jan.
Glory Goldie jumped to her feet, her cheeks aflame, her little yellow pigtail of a braid pointing straight out from her neck. "We call him Jan," she answered in a high, penetrating voice. Immediately a laugh went up from all parts of the room. The gentry, the School Board, parents and children all chuckled. Even the schoolmaster appeared to be amused.
In America everything is possible. But you have to work hard, Goldie, like Mary Antin study hard, put your mind on it." "Oh, I know it, pa!" Goldie exclaims, her momentary enthusiasm extinguished at the thought of long lessons indefinitely prolonged. Goldie was a restless little thing who could not sit long over her geography book.
But the one whom he had to consider before all others and be most guarded with was the old wife, who sat at home in the hut. It would have been a great consolation to him, and a joy as well, if greatness had come to her also. But it had not. She was the same as of yore. Anything else was hardly to be expected. Glory Goldie must have known it would be quite impossible to make an empress of Katrina.
Glory Goldie listened with marked attention. Before Katrina had tried to tell her of Jan's kindness toward many poor old people, but to that she had not cared to listen. This, on the contrary, seemed to impress the girl so much that Katrina began to hope the daughter's opinion of Jan would change and that she, too, would turn back. But Katrina was not allowed to cling to this hope long!
Jan did not want to ask him outright if he had received a letter from Glory Goldie. He thought he would attain his object more easily by approaching it in the indirect way the other had taken. So he said: "I've been thinking of what you told us about Glory Goldie the last time you were at our place." The seine-maker looked up from his work, puzzled.
They have got to go out into the world and shift for themselves my good friends." At last all was quiet in the house. The neighbours had left, so that Jan could just as well have gone inside; but he went on puttering with his fishing tackle a while longer. He would rather that Glory Goldie and Katrina should be in bed and asleep before he crossed the threshold.
The two were slackening their pace as they saw Felix at the carriage- door of a lady customer; and Lance said gravely, 'I'll see to Mother Goldie; but now, Bear, that you are out of this scrape, I give you fair warning, that if I find you grubbing your nose into that sort of thing again, I'll put a stop to it, one way or another. 'I'm not a bit worse than the rest. All the other fellows do it.
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