V
Lucy was sitting at a small table by the dining room window. She had bought a tube of cement, and with it she was mending a varied assortment of antique china she had discovered in a cupboard. It was raining outside, a chill, steady downpour. And the room was dim and cold, and it was a dismal world.
“I wish I was thirty!” she thought. Because at that advanced age she believed that one could be content to live in a historic cottage, and not mind dullness, or rain, or anything, very much. At thirty she would be content to devote her life to the ruined Cousin Ronald and her heroic mother. Yet, in a way, she disliked the thought of being thirty. She disliked all her thoughts this afternoon.
“As far as that goes,” she reflected, pursuing a certain familiar line, “I don’t have to wait for anybody to invite me. I can take mother to see ‘The Maddened Brute’ this very Saturday, if I like. I’ve got enough money for that. Only, mother wouldn’t like that sort of play. Anyhow, I don’t care!”
Carefully she cemented a handle on an ancient sugar basin; then, setting it down to dry, she looked out of the window. The postman, in a rubber coat, was coming along the muddy road.
“I don’t care!” she said again. She was not the sort of girl who waited with the slightest interest for letters that people had said they were going to write a week ago. Let them write, or not write; what cared she?
The postman came up on the porch and whistled, and the door opened—like a sort of cuckoo clock—and Cousin Winnie took in the letters. But what a long time she was in the hall!
“I suppose she’s got another letter from a cousin,” thought Lucy. “If there was anything for me—But I don’t care, anyhow.”
At last Cousin Winnie came into the dining room.
“A letter for you, Lucy,” she said, handed it to her child, and vanished. With the utmost indifference Lucy opened her letter. It contained two tickets for “The Maddened Brute” for Saturday afternoon, an[Pg 426] explanation of the difficulty of getting them, and a very civil request that she and her mother meet Stephen Ordway for lunch at the Ritz before the play.
Not yet being thirty, the girl was pleased.
“Mother!” she called. “Isn’t this nice? Listen—”
No answer. She got up and went into the kitchen, and found her mother standing by the window—just standing, doing nothing. This was alarming.
“Mother!” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Lucy—” said her mother. “Oh, Lucy! Oh, think of it! You can travel! You can have really nice clothes!” She was actually in tears.
“What is the matter?” cried Lucy. And then: “What’s this?”
It was a check for five thousand dollars which Cousin Winnie extended in her trembling hand.
“Your—your Cousin Peter—left it to you!”
“Cousin Peter! Who’s he?”
“You wouldn’t remember,” said Cousin Winnie. “A—a second cousin of—your grandfather’s. Oh, Lucy! My dear, good child! Now you can go away!”
“But the check’s made out to you, and it’s signed L. B. Grey—”
“A legal form,” Cousin Winnie explained. “I myself shall be well and amply provided for. This check is entirely for you, Lucy.”