“Wonders and more wonders,” she said. “It won’t be long until my little family are all gone. Think of me, widowed at thirty-five, with my children getting married like this. What am I to do, Miss MacDowell?”
“Why, there’s just one solution under the sun, Gertrude,” said Freda, seriously.
“What’s that, pray?”
“You’ll have to get married again. You’ll have to select another husband. Of course I never heard anything about your first one, but perhaps if you try again the picking will be better.”
“My first husband was really a prince of a chap,” she said calmly. “I don’t keep any photos because I hate to be reminded of what a fine fellow he was. But if you had seen him you would have fallen for him at once. No, Miss MacDowell, my quarrel was certainly not with George Manton in particular, but rather with the fact of marriage in general.”
“I see,” laughed Freda. “I suppose you didn’t like to be tied down.”
“Precisely the case, my dear. My nature was, and is, one of those unfortunate ones that doesn’t see sermons in stones, or poems in running brooks, or eternal happiness within the confines of a brick residence. I have never, even yet, reached the slippers-and-fireplace stage, and have never wearied of variety. I have never shed a tear of remorse that, at thirty-five, I am not putting my children to bed, and I was brought up to love commotion and a life of shifting change. I’m really a gypsy, you know, I love horses and I love to be going. My dear husband was a successful business man with a germ of the pater familias about him. He never quite got me, unfortunately. I worshipped the ground he walked on, but I never considered that my affection for him should change my home into a nunnery, nor that I should acknowledge my affection by living a hermetically-sealed life. Marriage! You really mustn’t mention it to me. I’m afraid I rebelled against its restrictions once and for all.”
“Gertrude is rather deep,” Mauney said to Freda, later, as they started putting the parlor in order for their task.
“Yes, she is,” Freda admitted. “She has as many brains as three average women, as much pep as twenty, and less caution than any I ever met. She really is a gypsy, I believe. I’d like to know her whole life.—Don’t you think I had better use this table?”