Crimson Roses E-Book

Grace Livingston Hill

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Alone in the city, Marion struggles to survive. Desperate to find a small bit of happiness, she impulsively spends some of her hard earned and terribly meager money on a season ticket to the symphony. On the night of the second concert, something wonderful happens. There, on Marion’s seat in the concert hall, lies a beautiful, dark crimson rose! And every week after that, she finds yet another beautiful, fresh rose waiting for her at the concert hall! Marion is torn between joy at receiving the beautiful flowers and worry at not knowing who could be sending them. Then, suddenly, Marion’s mystery flowers lead her into the confusing world of a wealthy man—and make her the target of a society beauty’s dangerous envy…

Leseprobe

Grace Livingston Hill

CRIMSON ROSES

Copyright

First published in 1928

Copyright © 2019 Classica Libris

Chapter 1

1920s, Eastern United States

The room was very still except for the ticking of the little clock, which stood on the table in the hall and seemed to Marion Warren to be tolling out the seconds one by one.

She sat by her father’s bedside, where she had been all day, only rising to give him his medicine or to tiptoe into the hall to answer some question of her sister-in-law’s or to speak to the doctor before he went out.

The doctor had been there three times since morning. He had come in the last time without being sent for. Marion felt sure that he knew the end was not far off, although he had not definitely said so. As she looked at the gray shadows in the beloved face, her own heart told her that her dear father had not much longer now to stay.

She would not call him back if she could to the suffering he had endured for the last two years, following an accident at his factory. She knew he desired to be through with it. He had often spoken about how good it would be to feel that the suffering was all over. Yet she had hoped against hope that he might be cured and given back to her. She had nursed him so gladly, and loved her task, even when sometimes her head ached and her back ached and her slender arms ached, and her flesh fairly cried out for rest. Her father was almost her idol. He and she had always understood one another and had had the same dreams and ambitions. He had encouraged her in taking more time for reading and study than her more practical mother had thought wise. He had talked with her of life and what we were put on this earth to do. He had hunted out books to please and interest her. She had read aloud to him for hours at a time, and they had discussed what she read. And after her mother died he had been both mother and father to her. How was she going to live without her father?

She had known, of course, since he was first taken ill that there was a possibility that he might not get well. But he had been so cheery and hopeful always, never complaining, never taking it as a foregone conclusion that he was out of active life forever, and always saying at night: “Well, daughter, I feel a little better tonight, I think. Perhaps the doctor will let me sit up in the morning. Wouldn’t that be great?”

Yet he had also lived and talked as if he might always be going to heaven tomorrow. Once he had said, “Well, I’m satisfied to live to be a very old man, if the Lord wills, or to go right now whenever He calls.”

These memories went pacing before the thoughts of the girl like weird shadows as she sat waiting in the darkened room, watching the dear white face. She had had no sleep since the night before last when her father had grown suddenly so very much worse. At intervals she wondered whether she were not perhaps a little light-headed now.

Marion’s brother, Tom, was sitting at the foot of the bed by the open hall door. He had been sitting there for an hour and a half. Occasionally he cleared his throat with a rasping sound. She knew he must be suffering, of course, yet somehow she felt that she alone was the one who was being bereaved. Tom was older and was not what he called “sentimental.” He had never understood the deep attachment between Marion and her father. He sometimes had called it partiality, but the girl always knew her father had not been partial. He loved Tom deeply. Yet he had never been able to make a friend and comrade of his practical, cheery, and somewhat impatient son. The son never had time to read and talk with his father. He had always had some scheme on hand to which he must rush off. He was like his bustling, practical mother, who even in her last illness had kept the details of the house and neighborhood in mind and sent others on continual errands to see this and that carried out as she planned. It was just a difference in temperament, perhaps. Marion wondered idly if Tom was thinking now how he might have made his father happier by being with him more. Tom loved their father, of course.

But Tom sat silently, dutifully, and now and then changed his position or cleared his throat. He seemed so self-possessed.

Marion was glad that he sat there. She would not have liked to have the responsibility alone. Tom had always been kind when it occurred to him. It did not always occur to him.

Jennie was there, too, Tom’s wife. She did not sit down but hovered in and out. Marion wished she would either go or stay. It somehow seemed like an interruption to have her so uneasy. It was just another thing to bear to hear her soft slipping around in felt slippers, calling Tom to the door to ask about some matter of household need, asking in a whisper if there had been any change yet. Marion shuddered inwardly. It seemed somehow as if Jennie would be eager for the change to come. As if there were no sacredness to her in their father’s dying. Yet that father had been exceedingly kind to Jennie. He had always treated her as if she were his own.

It was during one of these visits of Jennie to the sickroom that there seemed to come a change over the shadows on the white face. Jennie had breathed a syllable emphasizing it as it came, as some people will always make vocal a self-evident fact. Marion wanted to cry out, “Oh, keep still, won’t you, please!” but she held her lips closed tight and drew a deeper breath, trying to pray for strength.

The doctor was coming in. They could hear the street door open and close softly. The latch had been left off that he might come in when he wished. Marion looked up with relief. Ah! The doctor! Now, if there was anything to do, it would be done!

The doctor noted the change instantly. Marion could understand by the grave look on his face that it was serious business. He stepped silently to the bedside and laid practiced fingers on the frail wrist.

It was at that moment that the pale lips moved, and the eyelids opened, and her father looked at her.

Her hands were in his cold one instantly, and she thought she felt a faint pressure of the frail fingers.

“Bye, little girl!” he said faintly. “I have to leave you!” The eyelids closed, and she thought that he was gone, but he roused again and spoke in a clearer voice.

“You’ll have your home here—Tom will see to all that. He’ll understand—” The voice trailed off into silence.

Tom roused himself huskily and tried to speak, as if he were talking to one very far away.

“S’ all right, Dad. I’ll look after Marion. Don’t you worry.”

The sick man smiled.

“Of course!” he gasped, his breath nearly gone. “Good-bye!” His eyes searched the room.

“Jennie, too, and the children!”

But Jennie had slipped away suddenly.

Perhaps she had gone to her room to cry. Perhaps Jennie was fond of Father in her way after all, thought Marion.

But Jennie had not gone to cry. Jennie was stealing stealthily down the stairs, slipping like a ghost into the little den that had belonged to her father-in-law, where his big roll-top desk stood and his old desk chair, the walls lined with books. She closed the door carefully, snapped on the light, and pulled down the shade, then looked furtively around. It was not the first time that Jennie had visited that room.

Since her father-in-law had been ill, and Marion closely held in his service, she had managed to make herself thoroughly familiar with every corner of the house. She was not going in search of something. She knew exactly what she was after.

She took out a key from her pocket and went over to the desk. The key had been in her pocket for a week. She had found it while putting away things in her father-in-law’s closet. It had been on a key ring with other keys. She had taken it off of the ring one day when Marion was downstairs preparing some food for the invalid while he was asleep.

Jennie opened the right-hand lower drawer of the desk and moved some account books over. Then she took out a tin box from the back end of the drawer. She fit the key into the lock and opened the box. Breathlessly she turned over the neat envelopes carefully labeled “DEED OF THE HOUSE,” “TAX RECEIPTS,” “WATER TAX,” and the like, till she came to the envelope labeled “MY WILL.”

Jennie took this out, quickly put the rest back, locked the box, returned it to the drawer from which she had taken it, replaced the books, and closed the drawer. Then she picked up the envelope and held it in her hand for an instant, an almost frightened look in her eyes, as if she were weighing the possibilities of what she was about to do. She did not open the envelope and read the will, for she had already done that a week ago. Every word and syllable of the neatly written document was graven on her soul, and she had spent nights of waking, going over and over the brief paragraphs indignantly. The old man had no right to discriminate between his children. He had no right to leave the house entirely to Marion. If there were no will—that is, if no will were found, why, the law would divide the property. Tom would look after Marion, of course, in any case. But Tom should have the right to decide things. He should not be hindered with a girl’s whims. She could not see that what she was about to do was in any way wrong. No harm would come to her sister-in-law. In any case she would be cared for. It would simply smooth out things for Tom. And it was perfectly right.

Having shut her thin lips firmly over this decision, she opened the upper right-hand drawer, pulled it entirely out, and laid it on the desk. Then she reached far in and laid the envelope containing the will carefully at the back of the opening, replacing the drawer and shutting it firmly again, even turning the key that was in the lock.

Having done this, she snapped out the light and groped her way to the door, unlocking it and stealing back into the hall. She listened an instant and then glided up the stairs as silently as she had come down, a nervous satisfaction in her face.

She appeared in the doorway an instant too late to hear the last kindly word from her father-in-law. The doctor had raised his head from bending over to watch, and Marion was turning away with her hands to her throat and a look of exalted sorrow on her face. Marion was so strange! Why didn’t she cry? Jennie began to cry. It was hardly decent not to cry, Jennie thought. And Marion pretended to think so much of her father! Probably, though, she was worn out and really glad it was over. It was perfectly natural for a girl not to enjoy taking care of an old, sick man for so long. Two years! It had been two years since Father took sick! Well it was over, thank goodness, at last! Jennie buried her face in her handkerchief and sobbed gently.

Marion wished again that Jennie would keep still. Their last minutes, and the precious spirit just taken its flight! It seemed a desecration!

The doctor and Tom were talking in low tones in the hall now, and Marion turned back for one last, precious look. But even that look had to be interrupted by Jennie, who came with an air of doing her duty and stood at the other side of the bed.

“Poor old soul! He’s at rest at last!” she said with a sniff and a dab at her eyes with her handkerchief. “And you, Marion, you haven’t any call to blame yourself for anything. You certainly have been faithful!” This by way of offering sympathy.

It was piously said, but somehow the unusual praise from her sister-in-law grated on her just now. It was as if she were putting it in to exonerate herself as well.

Oh, please, please keep still! shouted Marion’s soul silently. But Marion’s lips answered nothing. She still wore that exalted look. After all, what did anything like this matter now? Let Jennie voice her meaningless chatter. She need not pay attention. She was trying to follow the flight of the dear spirit who had gone from her. She had not yet faced the life without him that was to be hers now that he was gone. She still had the feeling upon her that for his sake she must be brave and quiet. She must not desecrate the place by even a tear.

All through the trying days that followed until the worn-out body was laid to rest beside the partner of his youth in the peaceful cemetery outside the city, Marion had to endure the constant attentions of her sister-in-law. Jennie was always bringing her a cup of tea and begging her to lie down. Jennie wanted to know if she would like her to come into her room and sleep lest she would be lonely. Jennie disciplined the children for making a noise and told them their Aunt Marion didn’t feel well. Jennie became passionate in her vigilance until after the funeral was over. Marion was glad beyond words to be allowed at last to go to her own room alone and lock the door. To be alone with her sorrow seemed the greatest luxury that could now be given her.

And while she knelt beside her bed in the room that had been hers during her father’s illness—because it was next to his and she could leave the door open and listen for his call in the night—her brother, Tom, was down in the den going over his father’s papers.

Tom was a big, pleasant-faced man with an easy-going nature. He would not for the world hurt anybody, much less his own sister. He intended with all his heart to take care of her all her life if that was her need and her desire. He had not a thought otherwise. Yet when he began the search among those papers of his father it could not be denied that he hoped matters were so left that he would have full charge of the property without any complications. He had certain plans in the back of his head that an uncomplicated will would greatly facilitate. He and Jennie had often talked about these plans, and Jennie had urged him to speak to his father about it someday while there was time. But Tom did not like to seem interested; and, too, there was something about his father, perhaps a kind of dignity that he did not understand, that made Tom embarrassed at the thought of broaching the subject of money. So, Tom had never said a word to his father about the property.

Once or twice Tom’s father had dropped a word to the effect that if anything happened to him, Tom was to look after his sister, and Tom had always agreed, but there had never been anything definite spoken regarding the house or what money was left or even the life insurance. And Tom had never broken through the silence.

During that last afternoon when he had sat in the sickroom, tilted back against the wall in the shadows, clearing his throat now and then, he had been thinking about this. He had been wondering if, for all their sakes, he ought to try and rouse his father and find out just what he had done, how he had left things. But Marion had stayed so close to the bedside, and somehow he could not bring himself to speak about it with Marion there. There was something about Marion’s attitude that forbade any such thing.

But after his father had spoken to them about the house and about Marion, and said that he would understand, Tom had been uneasy. Perhaps after all his father had complicated things by putting Marion into the will in such a way that he would continually have to ask her advice and get her to sign papers and be always consulting her. He hoped against hope that his father had not been so foolish. Poor Father! He had always been so visionary. That was the word Tom could remember hearing his mother call his father. Visionary. She had said once that if father hadn’t been so visionary they might all have been rich by this time, and Tom had decided then and there that he would profit by his father’s mistakes and not be visionary.

But although Tom was a little worried, and thought about it quite often, he would not open the desk or try to find out anything about matters until his father was laid to rest. It did not seem fitting and right. Tom had his own ideas of what was the decent thing to do.

He waited until his sister had gone to her room and had had time to get to sleep, too, before he went to the den. It wasn’t in the least necessary for Marion to have to worry about business. She was a woman. To his way of thinking, women should not be bothered about business affairs; they only complicated matters. He always tried to make Jennie understand that, too. Sometimes he talked things over with her, of course, as she was his wife, but when it came to the actual business, he felt that he was the head of the family.

So, he had told Jennie to go to bed, as he had some papers to look over and might not go up for an hour or so yet, and he took himself to his father’s desk, armed with his father’s keys.

But Jennie was not so easily put off as Tom thought. Jennie crept to her bed with an anxious heart. She had put the little key back on the bunch with the other keys and felt that no one in the world would ever find out that she had had it, but yet she could not sleep. She could not help lying there and listening for Tom.

Jennie did not feel that she had done anything actually wrong. Of course not, her strange little conscience told her briskly. Why, she might easily have destroyed that will and nobody been any the wiser. But Jennie felt most virtuous that she had not. Of course, she would not do a thing like that! It would have been a crime in a way, even though its destruction was a good thing for all concerned. But to put it away carefully was another thing. The will was there. It was like giving Providence one more chance to save the day. If anything, ever came up to make it necessary, it could be found, of course. Why worry about it? It was safely and innocently lying where there was little likelihood of its ever being found, at least not till long after everything had been satisfactorily settled. And Marion wouldn’t make a fuss after a thing was done anyway. Suppose, for instance, Tom sold the old house and put the money into another one out in the country. Jennie loved the country. But Marion was strange sometimes. She took strong attachments, and one of them was this old house. She might make a lot of trouble when Tom tried to sell it if she owned it outright, as that will stated. It was perfect idiocy for Father ever to have done that anyway. It wasn’t right for a man to make a distinction between his children, and when he did it, he ought to be overruled.

So, Jennie lay awake two hours until Tom came to bed, wondering, anxious, and beginning to be really troubled about what she had done. Suppose Tom should somehow find it out! She would never hear the last of it. Tom was so over-conscientious! Well—but of course he wouldn’t find it out!

And then Tom came tiptoeing in and knocked over a book that had been left on the bedside table, and Jennie pretended to wake up and ask what he had been doing. She yawned and tried to act indifferent, but her hands and feet were like ice, and she felt that her voice was not natural.

Tom, however, did not notice. He was too much engrossed in his own affairs.

“You awake, Jennie? Strange thing! I’ve been looking through Dad’s papers, and I can’t find a sign of a will. I was sure he made one. He always spoke as if he had.”

“Mmmmm!” mumbled Jennie sleepily. “Will that make any trouble? Can’t you get hold of the property?”

“Oh, yes, get the property all right. Sort of makes things easier. The law divides things equally. But of course, I’ll look after the whole thing in any event. Marion doesn’t know anything about business. Gosh, I didn’t know it was so late! Let’s get to sleep. I’m dead tired. Got a hard day tomorrow, too!” And Tom turned over and was soon sound asleep.

Chapter 2

This house ought to have a thorough cleaning,” announced Jennie, coming downstairs a few days after the funeral. “It hasn’t been cleaned right since Father has been sick. I couldn’t really do it alone, and of course I’ll get at it this morning. It’ll do you good to pull out of the glooms and get to work.”

Marion reflected in her heart that it was not exactly lack of work from which she had been suffering, but she assented readily enough. She had not been able to do much housework for the last five years, and it probably had been hard on Jennie. So, she put on an old dress and went meekly to work, washing windows vigorously, going through closets and drawers and trunks, putting away and giving away things of her father and mother. That was hard work. It took the strength right out of her to feel that these material things, which had belonged to them and been, as it were, a part of them, were useless now. They would never need them anymore.

Of course, most of her mother’s things had long ago been disposed of, but there were her father’s clothes and the special things that had belonged to his invalidism. It was hard to put them away forever. Yet Jennie demanded that they be sent to a hospital.

“That bed table and the electric fan and the little electric heater and the hot water heater. They give me the creeps to look at them. It isn’t good to have such reminders around, Marion. You want to get away from everything that belonged to the sickroom. I for one want to forget sickness and death for a while and have a little good time living.”

Marion felt that Jennie was a bit heartless in the way she talked about it, but she realized that it would be better to put the things where they would be doing someone some good, so she packed them tenderly away and sent them to a poor, little, new hospital in which her church was interested, and sighed as she took down the soft curtains from the invalid’s windows and washed the windows and set them wide, realizing that the sunshine would not hurt tired eyes in that room anymore and could be let in freely without hindrance.

“Would you mind if Tom and I were to take Father’s room now?” asked Jennie the next day. “Then Bobby and the baby could have the room you’ve been occupying, and you can go back to the room you used to have before we came. It would change things around a little and not seem so gloomy in the house, don’t you think?”

The house didn’t seem gloomy to Marion the way it was, and she felt it rather sudden to tear up her father’s room and give it to another use, but of course it was sensible and better in every way for the children to be next to their father and mother. So, she said she didn’t mind, and they set to work moving furniture and changing things from one closet to another.

And after all, Marion rather enjoyed getting back to her old sunny room at the back of the house, with the bay window her father had built for her, her own little bookcase full of books, and her own pretty furniture her father and she had picked out years before. It brought sweet and tender memories and made her feel that life was a little more tolerable now. She could retire to her own pleasant room and try to feel like her little-girl self again, lonely and sad, of course, but still at home in the room that her father had made for her just after her mother had died—the sunniest, prettiest room in the house, she felt. It was a wonder that Jennie didn’t like it. Still, of course, she wanted to have the children nearer, and where they had been sleeping in the guest room was too far away for comfort. Now Nannie could come down from the small, third-story room and take the room her brothers had been occupying. It was better all around. But yet, she felt a lingering wistfulness about that front room where the invalid had lain so long. It was hard to feel its door shut and to know it did not belong to her anymore. It seemed as if Jennie was so anxious to wipe out all memory of her father.

But Jennie gave Marion very little time to meditate over these things. She seemed restlessly eager to keep something going all the time. At breakfast one morning she said to Marion, “Marion, I don’t see why you don’t get out and see your friends now. There’s nothing to hinder. Have a little company in and make the place lively. It will do you good. It’s been so gloomy all the time Father was sick. Let’s have some life now. Don’t you want to ask some friends in to dinner or lunch or something?”

Marion roused from her sad thoughts to smile.

“Why, I guess not, Jennie. I don’t know who I’d ask, I’m sure. Nearly all my old school friends are married or gone away or interested in their own affairs. I really haven’t seen any of them for so long they would think it odd if I hunted them out now. I never did go out much, you know. When I was in school, I was too busy, and after Mother got sick, I had no time.”

“Well, you’re too young to get that way. You’ll be an old maid before you know it. Tom, don’t you think Marion ought to get out more?”

“Why, if she wants to,” said Tom good-naturedly. “Marion always was kind of quiet.”

“Now, Tom, that’s no way to talk. You know Marion ought to get out among young folks and have good times. She’s been confined too long.”

But the tears suddenly came into Marion’s eyes, and her lip quivered.

“Don’t, please, Jennie!” she protested. “I wasn’t confined. I loved to be with Father.”

“Oh, of course,” said Jennie sharply. “We all know you were a good daughter and all that. You certainly deserve a lot of praise. But you owe it to yourself to go out more now. It isn’t right. Shut up in a city house. If only we lived out in the country, now it would be different.”

Marion didn’t quite see why the country would be any better, but she tried to answer pleasantly.

“Well, Jennie, I am going back to take my old Sunday school class if they still need me. I had thought of that.”

“Oh, a Sunday school class!” sniffed Jennie. “Well, if that pleases you, of course. But I should think you’d want to get in with some nice young folks again. My land! This house is as silent as the tomb! Why, I had lots of friends in Port Harris before we came here to be with you. They would run in every day, and we’d telephone a lot in between. They do that in the country or in a small town. But in a city nobody comes near you. They aren’t friendly.”

“I suppose you are lonely, Jennie,” said Marion apologetically. “I hadn’t realized it. I have been so occupied ever since you came.”

“Oh, I’m never lonely,” said Jennie, tossing her head. “I’m thinking of you. I could be alone with my house and my children from morning to night and never mind it. It’s you I’m worrying about.”

Marion looked at her sister-in-law in mild surprise. It was so new for Jennie to care what became of her. Jennie had manifested very little interest in her during the years she had been living with them. What had gotten into Jennie?

When they came to clean the den, Jennie insisted upon doing it herself, saying she thought it would be too hard for Marion yet awhile; it would remind her of her father too much. Marion tried to protest, but when she got up the next morning she found that Jennie had arisen before her and finished cleaning the room entirely, so that there was nothing left for Marion to do in there. She stood for a moment looking around the bare room with its book-lined walls, its desk and worn old chair, and the little upholstered chair where she used to sit by her father’s side and study her lessons in the dear old days when he was well, and she was still in school. Then she dropped into the desk chair with her head down on the desk and cried for a minute.

A wish came into her heart that she might have her house to herself for a little while. Just a little while. Of course, it was nice of Jennie to be willing to come there and do the work all these years while there had been sickness. Of course, Jennie had given up things to come. She had come a long way from her own father and mother, who lived up in Vermont, and she had not liked the city very well. But oh, if she just wouldn’t take things into her own hands quite so much and try to make her sister do everything she thought she ought. If she only hadn’t come into this sacred room and done the cleaning! It seemed to Marion that the spirit of the room had been hurt by such unsympathetic touches as Jennie would have given.

But that was silly of course! So, Marion raised her head and wiped her eyes and summoned a smile to go out and help Nannie wash the breakfast dishes. But somehow day after day the strange, hurt feeling grew in her heart that all the precious things of her soul life were being desecrated by Jennie. Yet Jennie was doing it out of kindness to her. If only there were some way to let Jennie know without hurting her feelings. Marion was gentle and shy and couldn’t bear to hurt people’s feelings.

Marion went to church the next Sunday. She had always loved to go to church, but it had been so long since she had been able to leave her father and go that it seemed strange now to her to be sitting alone in the old seat where she and father had sat.

She had dreaded this and had even ventured to suggest to Tom that perhaps he would go with her. Jennie had declined most decidedly. She couldn’t leave the baby. But Tom said he had to see a man who had some property for sale, and he wanted to find out about it. So, she had to come alone.

But it was good to be there again, after all, in spite of loneliness, and she had a feeling that her father would be pleased she had gone.

The minister came down and spoke to her kindly. He asked if she would come back to her old Sunday school class again. One of the ladies came over and asked her if she would come out to the Mite Society social and help wait on the folks; they had so much trouble getting girls to come and be waitresses.

Marion agreed to come, although she shrank tremendously from it. But it was something she could do, of course, and she felt she ought not to refuse. Jennie was most enthusiastic about it and offered to go with her, but when the evening came Jennie had a cold, and so she had to go alone.

As she entered the big Sunday school room where the social was to be held, she had an instant of hesitation. It seemed to her she could not go through a long evening all alone with strangers. She had always been a shy girl, and her five years of service caring for Mother and then Father had made her still more so. She was at home among books, not humans. If her books could have come alive and been present at that gathering, how gladly would she have walked in and conversed with their characters, one by one, thrilled by the thought of meeting those she knew so well. But a lot of people frightened her. She liked to be on the outside of things and watch. She loved to weave stories to herself about people, but to have to move among them and make conversation was terrible. She had purposely come late to avoid having to sit and talk a long while with someone while people were gathering.

But a group of merry girls was coming in behind her, and she hated to have them stare at her, so she hurried in and took off her coat and hat in the ladies’ parlor, which was already well decorated with hats and wraps.

The bevy of eager girls entered just as she turned to go out, shouting and laughing, pretty in bright-colored dresses, combing their bobbed locks, some of them even dabbing on lipstick, holding up their tiny hand mirrors and teasing one another loudly in a new kind of slang that Marion did not in the least understand. They were very young girls, of course, but some of the things they were saying were shocking. Could it be that girls, nice girls, girls who belonged to the church and Sunday school, talked like that nowadays?

She shrank away from them and went into the main room.

For a moment she was dazed before the clamor of tongues and the medley of pretty dresses. Someone was playing the piano, and everybody seemed trying to talk as loud as possible to be heard above it. She felt somehow a stranger and an alien.

She began to look about for someone she knew.

Off at the other side of the room was a group of young people, three of them old schoolmates of Marion’s. Mechanically she made her way toward them, half hoping they might welcome her to their midst. There was Isabel Cresson. She used to help Isabel with her algebra and geometry problems in school. She had never been especially intimate with her, but at least she was not a stranger.

But when she arrived at the corner where the young people had established themselves, she was not met with friendliness. Anna Reese and Betty Byson bowed to her, but Isabel Cresson only stared.

“Oh, why you’re Marion Warren, aren’t you?” she said with a condescending lift of her eyebrows. “How are you? It’s been ages since I’ve seen you. I thought you must have moved away.”

Marion tried to explain that her father had been ill, and she had not been able to be out, but Isabel was not listening. She had merely swept Marion with a disconcerting glance, which made her suddenly aware that her dress was out of date and her shoes were shabby, and then turned her eyes back to the young men with whom she had been talking when Marion arrived.

Marion mechanically finished her sentence about her father’s recent death, feeling most uncomfortable and wishing she had not explained at all. Isabel turned her glance back toward her long enough to say, “Oh, too bad. I’m sorry, I’m sure,” and then got up and moved across to the other side of the circle to speak to one of the young men. She did not suggest introducing Marion to the young men. No one made any attempt to move or include her in their circle. Marion dropped down in a chair just behind them, too hurt and bewildered to get herself away from them immediately.

The girls and men chattered on for some minutes, ignoring her utterly. Once she heard Isabel say, with a light laugh in response to something one of the men had said, “Yes, one meets so many common people at a church affair, don’t you think? I’ve coaxed Uncle Rad to let us go to some more exclusive church, out in a suburb you know, or uptown, but he doesn’t see it. He was born and brought up in this church, and nothing will do but we’ve all got to come. I’ve quit, however. I simply can’t stand the affairs they have here constantly. I only came tonight because I was asked to sing. Say Ed, did you hear that Jefferson Lyman is home? That’s another reason I came. They say he is coming here tonight just for old times’ sake. I don’t much believe it, but I took the chance.”

“And who is Jefferson Lyman?” asked the young man, who was evidently a newcomer in town.

“Oh, mercy, don’t you know Jeff? Why, he’s an old sweetheart of mine. We used to be crazy about each other when we were kids. Walked back and forth to school together and all that. Jeff’s been abroad for five or six years, and they say he’s tremendously sophisticated. I’m just dying to see him.”

“But who is he? Does he live around here? Not one of the Lymans, from the Lyman firm?”