During her last term at the finishing school she obediently paid a great deal of attention to her dancing, to drawing room deportment, and to her own beautiful young body, learning to groom it expertly. And during the Christmas and Easter vacations she netted three proposals of marriage, from brothers of classmates in whose homes she visited. She learned, somehow, to say “no” so tactfully that her suitors were almost as flattered by her refusals as they would have been if she had accepted them.
Enid and Courtney Barr came down from New York to see her graduate, and with them they brought the news of her legal adoption.
“A surprise, too!” Enid chanted, swinging her daughter’s hands excitedly. “Court and I are going to take you to Europe with us this summer, and keep you away from New York until almost time for you to make your debut.”
“Europe!” Sally was dazed. Her first thought was that Europe was so far away from Capital City and David. He was getting his diploma now, just as she was getting hers—“Oh, Mother, you haven’t forgotten your promise, have you?”
Enid frowned slightly, abashed by Sally’s lack of enthusiasm. “Promise, darling?”
“That I could invite David to my coming-out party? Mother, I’ve lived for two years on that promise!” she cried desperately, as the frown of annoyance and anger deepened on her mother’s exquisite, proud little face.
Periodically, during the four months that the Barrs spent in wandering over Europe, Enid’s evasive reply to Sally’s urgent question thrust itself frighteningly through the new joys she was experiencing.
Enid had shrugged and said: “Remind me when we’re making up the invitation list this fall, Sally.” She knew now that her mother had counted on her forgetting David, that Enid had told herself until she believed it, because she wanted to believe, that the transformed Sally, the Sally whom she had remade into the kind of girl who could take her place in society as the daughter of Enid and Courtney Barr, would be a little ashamed of her 16-year-old infatuation for a penniless young farmer.
But Sally’s heart had not changed, no matter how radically Enid’s money, the finishing school and Europe had altered her, mentally and physically.
One morning in November Sally knocked at the door of the small, pleasant room known to the Barr household as “Miss Rice’s office.” Linda Rice held the difficult, exacting but always exciting position of Enid Barr’s social secretary. Sally liked Linda, envied her her independence, her tactful, firm handling of her sometimes unreasonable employer. As she knocked now, fear of her mother fluttered in the heart that was so full of love and admiration for her. For she knew that Enid and Linda were making up the invitation list for the long-discussed coming-out party.