Glen spent all her free time with her father, driving him capably over the deeply rutted country roads, waiting for him in the mud-splashed buggy while he made his calls, her head bent over her lessons. He liked having her with him, but he fretted because she made no young intimacies.

Her one real friend was a curious choice—a fragile spinster who taught English and History, Miss[18] Ada Tenafee, impoverished connection of the ancient and honorable Tenafee clan, in whose thinly fleshed veins the blue blood ran fiercely. The singularly vivid child made an instant appeal to “Miz-zada,” as her hectoring pupils called her, while Glen felt for her something of the chivalrous pity she had given her mother. Her devotion deepened with perspective: Effie’s foolish, futile ways grew dim and dimmer in her memory.

[18]

It was the opposite with her father. “Whyn’t you bring young ones home to supper?” he would demand. “Whyn’t you go play with ’em?” He was secretly dashed. Was his system failing as utterly as his wife’s had done? Then it was her fault—because she had spoiled the child in her formative years. He criticized and resented Effie more in her grave than ever when she was moving about his house at her hesitating gait, soft eyes and soft chin tremulous.

Once, tripping over the Persian rug, his temper flared. “Oh, damn that thing anyway! Always did detest it! Get rid of it! Give it to the darky!”

Glen, looking up from her Ancient History, stared at him. She could not know that his sore heart harked back to a honeymoon day, with a blue-eyed bride kneeling and worshiping, setting up her delicate standards to belittle his, but she did remember the incident of the fairy tale.

[19]“For nine long years I’ve been looking at it and wishing for things I knew I could never have!”

[19]

The girl left her chair, walked to the rug and smoothed it into place again, looking gravely down at its old rose and mauve, its fawns and deep blues. “No, I won’t ever give it away,” she said, very quietly. “She liked it, and I like it.”

Then the doctor stamped out of the room, swearing, banging the door behind him, ashamed of himself, and furious for being ashamed, and his child looked after him consideringly.

His practice narrowed down to the mill hands and the mountaineers. It was the work which interested him most, and he put heart into it 

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