slowly but inexorably by freight, could crush her: she and her daughter were on the Wishing Carpet, which was bearing them away to enchanted isles.

She had always been the type of Northerner who applauds violently when the band plays “Dixie,” and now she visualized herself in softly ruffled and gauzy frocks, rocking on a white pillared porch while her child disported herself beneath the magnolia trees, and the dusky, adoring servitors sang at their toil. There were other women in the vision, delicate, high-bred creatures who dropped their r’s and spoke in a sweet, languorous drawl—who understood her, and made her one of them. The doctor[7] did not appear in the picture very prominently. He would be in his office or away on his calls, but even Glenwood Darrow, she dared to hope, would mellow in that rich and golden atmosphere.

[7]

It was her slow, reluctant relinquishment of the fiction, her bitter and rebellious acceptance of the fact, which put the seal of permanence on her invalidism. She was better in body for a year or two, but the will-to-live went out of her, never to return.

Dr. Darrow disliked the South and refused to adjust himself to it. He was a rushing, bustling sort of person who enjoyed movement for its own sake, and he went charging about among the slow-stepping, slow-speaking Southerners and found himself with wide margins of time left over, and grew caustic and choleric. He went out of his way to mention that his father and two of his uncles had shared Sherman’s march to the sea, and took pains to contrast the speed and efficiency of Chicago with the meandering methods of the lovely, drowsy old Southern city.

It was both natural and just that they should resent his attitude, but it was hard that Effie, who, like Agag, had come unto them delicately, ready to rise at the first strains of “Dixie,” ready even to drop her r’s as soon as she could get the knack of it, should be so inflexibly ignored.

They were never actively unkind to her: they were[8] simply—and utterly—unaware of her. She felt, to the day of her death, snatching at every chance to blame her heedless husband, that his choice of a house had a great deal to do with her failure. He bought it while they were staying at a hotel, without consulting her.

[8]

“Wanted to surprise you!” he beamed, but sensing very soon how thoroughly and disastrously he had done so.

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