Of the few minutes that followed, Mary Jane never
had a very good idea. She knew she must have
screamed with the pain of a hurt finger because the
laundress rushed in from the yard, mother came from
upstairs and in a few minutes Aunt Effie hurried breathlessly
down the stairs. Then, before long, the doctor
was there too, and her finger was all tied up with
sticks on each side and father hurried in the front
door and asked her how she’d like a nice, long,
Christmasy stick of candy. It all happened just
that quick.
“I think things is so funny,” said Mary
Jane later as she luxuriously licked her candy.
“If Marie Georgiannamore hadn’t hid and
if Kewpie hadn’t gone to the washing and if
I hadn’t wondered about that wringer thing, I
wouldn’t have had this candy that I’ve
wanted for—for ninety-seven days.”
“Yes,” agreed the doctor as he went out
of the door, “things is funny. And my advice
to you, young lady, is this; next time you want to
see how a wringer works, ask before you investigate.
Another time you might lose, instead of bruise, your
finger.”
“I will,” nodded Mary Jane, “only
I don’t want to know how it works any more—I
know enough now, I do.”
It’s very funny to go around the house with
your finger tied up in a bandage and two strips of
wood—that is, it’s funny the first
day. By the second day it’s queer and after
that it’s no fun at all; it’s a bother.
Long before Mary Jane was allowed to use her hand
again she had decided that never, never, NEVER
would she poke her finger into anything. It takes
only a second to poke a finger in but it takes a good
long time to get a badly hurt finger well, she had
learned that.
For the first three days Aunt Effie played with her
all the day long and that wasn’t so bad.
They played dress up and school and Aunt Effie showed
her how she had school when she was a little girl.
And they made new dresses for all the dolls; and straightened
the drawers of all the doll dressers and—well,
they did every single thing that Mary Jane could think
of or Aunt Effie could plan. And then, without
a minute’s warning a telegram came; a telegram
which said that Aunt Effie must come home at once
because her sister was sick.
And after that Mary Jane was lonesome, oh, so very
lonesome and she couldn’t think of half enough
things to do to fill the days. For, you see,
Mrs. Merrill had her duties and father had to go to
his work and Alice had her school and Doris had the
chicken pox so no one, much as they might have wished
to, could spend every minute of the day with a little
girl who was perfectly well except for a hurt finger.
That little girl had to play by herself a part of
the time.
Mary Jane was standing by her mother’s dresser,
a couple of mornings after Aunt Effie left, when the
cleaning woman came into the room to give it its weekly
cleaning.
