whose other orb angrily glowered at the music as if to overawe it. Had he possessed a third eye it might have guided his hands along the keyboard with more accuracy, but this detail could have affected the result but little, since his hands were incessantly compelled to clutch the incessantly deciduous music and slap it back on the rack. Two stanzas had thus been punctuated before a shy old maid named Deborah Larrabee ventured to rise and stand at the piano, supporting the music. This compelled her to a closer proximity to a nice young man than she had known for so many years that she almost outblushed the young girl. Deborah was afraid to look at anybody, yet when she cast her eyes downward she had to watch those emotional knees of Mr. Maugans's slowly parting in the crescendo that never came. It was an ordeal for everybody–singer, pianist, and music-sustainer. But the audience was friendly, and the composer and the poet were too dead to gyrate in their distant graves. The song, therefore, had unmitigated success, and the words were so familiar that everybody knew pretty well what Pamela was driving at when she sang: CONTENTS There was hardly a dry eye or a protesting ear in the throng as she reached the climax: CONTENTS The girl's mother was not hard to find among the applauding auditors. She looked like the wrecked last September's rose of which her daughter was the next June's bud. The softened mood of Birdaline and the tears that bedewed her cheeks gave her back just enough of the beauty she had had to emphasize how much she had lost. And Josie, her quondam rival in the garden, was sweetened by melancholy, too. It was not hospitality alone, nor mere generosity, but a passing sympathy that warmed her tone as she squeezed Birdaline's arm and told her how well her daughter had sung. A number of matrons felt the same attar of regret in the air. They had been beautiful in their days and in their ways, and now they felt like the dismantled rose on the floor. The common tragedy of beauty belated and foredone saddened everybody in the room; the old women had experienced it, the young women foresaw it, the men knew it as the destruction of the beauties they loved or had loved. Everybody was sad but Deborah Larrabee. That homely little old spinster slipped impudently into the elbow of the
Prev.
Back
Top