Harriet L. Smith

“ Annabel had reached a point where speech was a necessity. For years, she had returned Persis' dislike with the added venom of a small nature. But at this moment, when an outpouring of confidence seemed essential, she knew there was no one to whom she could speak so freely as to this woman she had hated.
"Life's cruel, cruel! It promises us women everything. And then it cheats us and tricks us and takes away all that it gave, one thing after another. It's like bleeding to death, losing your beauty little by little, fighting your hardest and knowing you've got to be beaten in the end. ”

“ The little organ was wheezing out the wedding march as if it meant to be equal to the occasion if this proved its swan-song. The ushers were advancing up the aisle two by two. With drooping heads and measured steps, the bridesmaids followed, and then came Diantha on her father's arm. The little flutter that went over the waiting assembly was chiefly an involuntary tribute to her girlish grace and beauty, though the dress, too, came in for its share.
"Might have been bought in Paris for all anybody could tell," was the assurance passed from lip to lip. Clematis was proud of that wedding dress. ”

“ In her heart she knew better. She had worked on through the gray years, facing a colorless future, without a word from her one-time lover, to tell her that he lived or ever thought of her, and yet a dream, too vague and illusory to be named hope, had been her stay and solace. Now as she stared wide-eyed into the dark, she asked herself what was left.
It was no wonder that the gray crêpe grew apace. For the first time in her well-disciplined life, Persis gave up the struggle with refractory nerves, left her bed night after night and sewed till daybreak. ”

“ Joel groaned. "Rank suicide! Suicide just as much as if you put a revolver to your head. It sounds well to talk about prime cuts of beef and all that, but when you come down to cold facts, what's meat? Dead stuff, that's all. It ain't reasonable to talk of building up life out of death."
Persis' quick ear had caught the sound of stealthy movements in the adjoining room. She wove her needle into the seam, a practise so habitual that probably she would have done the same if the lamp had exploded unexpectedly, and crossing to the kitchen door, opened it without warning. ”

“ Blue misty shadows veiled the steely light of her eyes.
"The baby's crying," she said, and left him swiftly. And Joel, with a bewildered sense of enlightenment carried to the point of dazzling effulgence, clapped both hands over his throbbing head.
"Well," he gasped, "I'll be jiggered! Looks like you can live in the same house with a woman from the time she's born till she's gray-headed and not know her any better than if you'd met her once at a Sunday-school picnic. To think of Persis with all those feelings bottled up inside her for the last twenty years. ”

“ Justin did not notice. He was absorbed in gleaning from her all possible information as to the change in Persis' circumstances and quite indifferent to the emotions of his reluctant informant. With the relentlessness of the thoroughly selfish, he continued his cross-examination till Annabel's mind seemed to herself a squeezed orange. She felt something like terror mingling with a sense of physical exhaustion. It always frightened her to find herself unable to keep a man's attention focused on herself when she had him to herself. ”

“ Thompson had succeeded in piquing her curiosity, Persis drew the enclosure from the envelope and for an instant studied the monogram at the head of the sheet. When her gaze dropped to the address, her eyebrows lifted.
"Yes, I know," murmured young Mr. Thompson. "'Tommy darling.' Tommy is short for Thompson, I suppose. Tommy-rot, I call it. You might read it aloud if you don't mind. It'll help me to have a realization of what I'm up against." ”

“ As a matter of fact, Diantha's pain and peril were remote from her mood. Her mind had room for one thought: "Hast thou found me, O mine enemy!"
As she stared before her, hand gripping hand, her bloodless lips moving inarticulately, she saw the monstrous folly of her self-deception. She had played at youth, listened to the love-making of undeveloped boys whose mother she might have been, and made herself believe that she could cheat Time. ”

“ Her eyes upon the girl's averted face, Persis measured off the coarse stuff, using her arm as a yard-stick. "Hm! Even with skirts as skimpy as they are now, this won't be enough by a yard and a half. Better call it two yards. It's high time your skirts were coming down where they belong. You can't stay a little girl forever."
Some magic had erased the fretful pucker between Diantha's brows. The grim ungirlish compression of her lips softened into angelic mildness. As she turned upon Persis, she looked an older sister of the Sistine cherubs. ”

“ A lover might last six months or even a year, but as a rule he was displaced in considerably less time by some understudy whom Annabel had thoughtfully kept in training for the star rôle.
In Annabel's creed, masculine admiration was the supreme good. It was the ultimate test of a woman's success, as the ability to make money tested the success of men. Beauty was precious, because it was the most effective lure. Talent was not to be despised, since it too could boast its captives. ”

“ Persis mused. Diantha was wrong, undoubtedly, and yet more sinned against than sinning. Cautions and expostulations were unavailing with this spirited young creature, smarting under continued injustice and seeing with her uncompromising clearness of vision the selfish jealousy which would keep her out of her birthright indefinitely. "You want to be real careful, Diantha," said Persis, realizing the futility of her words. "Thad's a nice boy and you're a nice girl, but it don't look well for young folks to be meeting on the sly." ”

“ The testimony of the hand-mirror was reassuring, clear pink and white, the crisp freshness of apple blossoms. Annabel worshiped and rose from her knees, duly fortified against the mischances of the day, though her divinity had been only her own beauty.
At nineteen, Annabel had married a man twenty years her senior, who like many of his sex assumed that a pretty wife is from the Lord and associated amiability, compliance and other feminine graces with a rose-leaf complexion. ”

“ Secretary of an investment company making such golden promises! That looked as if at last fortune had smiled on Justin Ware.
The two men had the talk to themselves. Persis' absorption was penetrated now and then by references to the miracles wrought by scientific spraying and pruning, or the possibility of heating orchards so that late frosts would no longer have terrors for the fruit grower, sober facts which the literature of the Apple of Eden Investment Company had enveloped in the rosy atmosphere of romance. ”

“ While Mary made the beds, and Persis packed the luncheon in the kitchen, and the children raced about getting in one another's way, and prolonging the preparations they were desirous of hastening, Joel waited in a cold sweat, half realizing the absurdity of his misgiving, but quite at its mercy. He knew that if Celia changed her mind at the last minute and departed with the others, life would not be worth the living. ”

“ Nothing that Annabel Sinclair could do would surprise her, nor did she wonder when boys of Thad West's age yielded to her lure. But that this man, this staid, stanch Thomas, on whom she had counted more implicitly than she knew, should have proved so easy a victim shook her native faith in humankind. "All men are alike," thought Persis, in her haste betrayed into one of those sweepingly unjust generalizations such as King David penitently acknowledged. ”

“ From the room across the hall she brought Celia, a chrysalid child, sleeping heavily, closely wrapped in an old plaid shawl, and laid her on Joel's bed. Celia's thatch of black hair fell untidily across the pillow. The fever gave her olive skin an unwonted color. Joel made an ineffectual effort to lift his arm. Then as he desisted, sighing, his sister gently lifted his hand till it touched the hot fingers of the sleeping child.
"They're—such little—things—Persis." His labored breath made speech fragmentary. "It's funny, how—they fill up—all the room in—a man's heart." ”

“ Men of her own age bored her. They were interested in business, politics, their families, a thousand things besides herself. They had lost the obsession of personality, the you-and-I attitude which is the life-blood of flirtation.
Just now Annabel preferred boys still young enough to be secretly proud of the necessity of shaving every other day, young enough to swagger a little when they lighted a cigarette. ”

“ CHAPTER IX A DAY TO HERSELF Persis had resolved on a new gown.
The livelier iris which in spring changes on the burnished dove, reveals nature's universal tactics. On looking over her wardrobe after her day at the Hornblower farm, Persis had been appalled by its manifest shortcomings. The black mohair, held to the light, betrayed an unmistakable greenish tinge. The navy blue was long since out of style. As for the wine-colored henrietta, it had never been becoming. ”

“ Warren's guests abashed at Persis' advent, like children discovered in some forbidden pastime. They avoided one another's eyes, assuming an expression of grave absorption, whose obvious implication was that the uplifting of the community was the matter most in their thought.
With all her interest in other people's affairs, the personality of Persis Dale was as a killing frost to many a flourishing scandal. She had a readiness to believe the best, a reluctance to condemn her fellow men on anything short of convincing proof, fatal to calumny. ”

“ Resistance seldom detracts from a woman's value in a man's eyes. When Justin rose to go he was almost ready to believe himself in love. He was a little angry, slightly amused and more in doubt as to her state of mind than he often felt regarding his opponents in the eternal duel. When Persis gave him her hand for good night he held it in both his own for a moment and raised it to his lips. ”

“ Susan was finishing her early breakfast, her hair still wound about her crimping pins, the painfully strained and denuded effect which resulted being a necessary preliminary to the rippling luxuriance of the afternoon. Persis stated her errand tersely.
"Susan, they've sent for me from Trotters', and there's no telling when I'll be home. I wish you'd go up to the house, if you've nothing particular on hand and look after Joel. He's the helplessest man ever born when it comes to doing for himself." ”

“ His life-long habit of standing scornfully aloof while his fellow beings strove to enjoy themselves, proved no match for Celia's artless appeals. "Please come, Uncle Joel," she would, coax. "It's lots more fun with you along." And to the open amusement of his neighbors and his sister's ill-concealed wonder, Joel submitted to long automobile rides, to briefer excursions on the river and lake and to eating picnic luncheons with his back against a tree and on his face an expression conveying his unshaken conviction that there were ants in his sandwich. ”

“ As for Persis, as she carried the new arrival down-stairs to make the acquaintance of his brothers and sisters, her comely face was radiant. Weariness was forgotten. The hours of uncertainty, the long hours when Life and Death matched forces in that old duel renewed with each new existence, had all been forgotten. For a man was born. ”

“ The younger woman was small and slender, and under the stress of excitement Persis lifted her to the couch as easily as if she had been a child. Then she sprinkled the white face with water from the pitcher on the table and brought the camphor bottle into play, all the time murmuring words of endearment and sympathy whose restorative effect was possibly not second to that of her other remedies. Young Mrs. Thompson returned to consciousness to hear herself called a "lamb" and a "poor dear." She opened her heavy eyes and gave back a rapturous smile to the other woman's comprehending gaze. ”

“ Joel spoke in heart-broken accents. "I guess the Good Book ain't far wrong in calling money the root of all evil. Up till you come into this prop'ty, you was all a man could ask for in a sister." Like many another, Joel found his blessings brightest in retrospect. "But now you're as set as a post and as stubborn as a mule. It's pretty dangerous, Persis, when a woman gets the idea she knows all that's worth knowing. As the poet says, 'A little learning is a dangerous thing.' I feel in my bones that there's trouble coming out of this wild-goose chase of yours." ”

“ Persis, distracted for a moment by the false alarm of a twisting seam, soon returned to her guns. With a skill Annabel was forced to admire, she veiled her cruelty in compliment.
"Diantha is a pretty girl. Pretty and clever with her tongue. An apple's got to have flavor as well as a rosy skin. There'll be lively times at your place before long. It'll make you and Mr. Sinclair feel young again to have courting going on in the house."
If murderous thoughts were as potent as daggers, Persis would never have fitted another gown. Annabel was reaching the point where self-control was difficult. ”

“ But he was a man and that he should choose to spend two evenings in a week with another woman, after she had given him to understand that his society would be agreeable to herself, argued a decline in her powers of fascination. She told herself that she hated Persis, that she hated Justin, that she loathed life and the miserable business of being a woman, and she ended by finding pretexts for daily excursions past the Clematis House, always arrayed in the most fetching street costumes. ”

“ That Persis' dry retort veiled sarcasm was far from Diantha's thought. She continued guilelessly.
"He's got such good taste, Thad has. Don't you think men have better taste than women, Miss Persis? All women care about is following the styles, and men think whether the way you do your hair is becoming or not. If a thing isn't pretty, they don't care a bit about its being stylish." ”

“ The man's growing apathy at length gave the victory to the woman. If he did not hate his wife, Stanley Sinclair was so far from loving her that his thin lips curled mockingly over the recollection of what he had hoped on his wedding-day. If there is pathos in the lost illusions of youth, those of middle life are grim tragedy. ”

“ Leveridge, having made terms with her conscience, from all appearances rather enjoyed the responsibility of enlightening her audience, "It's her husband."
"Her husband!" cried Susan Fitzgerald protestingly; "why, she hasn't been married six months."
Mrs. Leveridge's smile showed more than a tinge of patronage.
"If you'd ever been married yourself, Susan, you'd know that six months was enough, quite enough. If he's that kind of a man, six weeks is about as long as he can keep on his good behavior." ”