So it came about that Lloyd fell quite naturally into her former habit of dropping in to see Mrs. Bisbee and Mrs. Apwell and all the other old ladies, who welcomed her with open arms. One blowy afternoon in March she took her embroidery and went to sit with Mrs. Bisbee awhile, beside the window that Mrs. Walton had laughingly dubbed the "window in Thrums." The old lady, growing chatty and confidential over her quilt-piecing, seemed so unusually companionable, that Lloyd remarked:
"It really seems as if I'm catching up to you all, Mrs. Bisbee. As I get oldah everybody else gets youngah. Why, this wintah mothah has been just like a sistah. I had no idea she could be so much fun. We do everything togethah now. I help with the housekeeping so that she can hurry through with it early in the mawning and then we practise, piano and harp, or she plays the accompaniments for my songs. And then we read French awhile and we go for long walks and we discuss every subject undah the sun, just as Betty and I used to do. And we plan things to do in the deliciously long cosy evenings—surprises, you know, for grandfathah and Papa Jack. I believe I'm enjoying this pah't of my yeah bettah than the first."
Mrs. Bisbee looked out of the window wistfully at nothing.
"That's the way that it used to be here when daughter was at home," she sighed. "Sometimes I think if I'd had the planning of the universe I'd have fixed it differently. Just when your little girl is grown up to be a comfort and a joy, and the best company in the world, some man steps in and takes her away from you. I had daughter to myself only one short year after she got through school. Then she married. Of course it would have been selfish to have stood in the way of her happiness, yet—"
She shook her head with another sigh, and left the sentence unfinished. "I have often wondered how I could have stood it if her marriage had been an unhappy one, like poor Amy Cadwell's. You know her."
"Only slightly," answered Lloyd, recalling a face that always aroused her interest; a face with thin compressed lips and watchful defiant eyes, that seemed to have grown so from the long guarding of a family skeleton.
It was not gossip the way Mrs. Bisbee told the story, only the plain recital of a sad bit of human history that had fallen under her observation. The cloud of it rested on Lloyd's face as she listened.
"That's the worst thing about growing up," she exclaimed bitterly when Mrs. Bisbee paused, "the finding out that everybody isn't good and happy as I used to think they were. Lately, just these last few months that I've been out in society I've heard so much of people's jealousies and rivalries and meannesses and insincerity, that I'd sometimes be tempted to doubt everybody, if it were not for my own family and some of the people out in this little old Valley that I've trusted all my life.
"There's Minnie Wayland, whose engagement was announced last month to Mistah Maybrick. I don't see how she dares marry when her own fathah and mothah made such a failure of it, that they can't live togethah, and Mistah Maybrick's wife got a divorce from him on account of some dreadful scandal the papahs were full of. I couldn't go up and wish her joy when the othah girls did. She talked about it in such a flippant mattah of business way, as if millions atoned for everything. One of the girls laughed at me for taking it so seriously, and said that matches aren't made in heaven nowadays, and that I'd have to get ovah my old-fashioned Puritanical notions and ideals if I expected to keep up with the sma'ht set. I thought for awhile that maybe it was only the sma'ht set who are that way, but what you've just told me about Mrs. Cadwell, and what I've heard lately about several families right in our own little neighbahhood, shows that it's all a bad old world, and these yeahs I've been thinking it so good I've been blind and ignorant. I suppose it's for the best, but I'm sorry sometimes that my eyes have been opened."
Mrs. Bisbee sighed again at her vehemence, and then quite unexpectedly piped up in a thin tremulous voice, with one of the songs of her youth. In a high minor key and full of quavers, it was so ridiculous that they both laughed.