her contacts with the young life about her, and meager as had been her romantic reading (even after the doctor’s death she had kept on with the histories and philosophies and the fiery weeklies) she knew that theirs was an amazing friendship, an astonishing romance. He had never brought her a flower; they had never sat side by side on stools at the drug-store counter on summer evenings, drinking ice-cream sodas; they had never gone to a moving picture together. He came sometimes to the dull house in the dull street, and they sat on the veranda if Miss Ada was reading in the sitting room, in the sitting room, if she happened to be upstairs—the cheerful, tidy, ugly room with its golden oak and strident carpet, and Effie Darrow’s[70] one treasure, the Persian rug, but their talk was always of work, his work, hers, or theirs, if she did not read aloud to him from her father’s books.

[70]

But that, she told herself, leaping from her bed, taking the frigid shower of her father’s prescribing, flying into vest and knickers and the stern simplicity of her business dress, all that belonged to the past, before she was nineteen ... twenty....

“My dear,” Miss Ada remarked with solicitude, “you’ve hardly sipped your coffee, and you haven’t touched your cereal!”

“I’m not hungry, Miss Ada.”

Her friend began a soft and anxious clucking. “You’re quite sure, honey, that you are perfectly well?”

Then Glen Darrow did a startling thing. She jumped up from her place at the breakfast table and made a disconcerting dash for the faded teacher and gathered her into a breathless young hug.

“Yes, Miss Ada, dear,” she spoke with her lips against the gentlewoman’s pallid cheek, “yes! I’m quite sure that I’m perfectly well and perfectly happy!”—and, leaving her wide-eyed and trembling, she sped out of the house and down the hill.

Miss Tenafee rang the bell and directed Phemie to bring her another cup of coffee, and she drank it black. “It’s come,” she told herself unhappily. “It can’t be anything else. She’s made up her mind to[71] marry that young savage, and the doctor has beaten me. I’m helpless ... helpless....” she pushed her chair back and the slow tears welled up in her eyes and spilled over and ran down her lean cheeks and the taste of them was salt in her mouth. “She’ll marry him, and I’d rather see her in her grave!”

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