With that, not looking at her, but at his plate, he offered her the newspaper. Lily did not take it. She stared at it, wholly incredulous; then she reddened with sudden high colour, and, remembering Ada’s queer look of last night, needed not even the confirmation of the queerer letter just read to understand that the thing was true.
She said nothing, but after a moment went to her chair at the table, and, although he did not look at her, Mr. Dodge had a relieved impression that she was about to sit down and eat her breakfast in a customary manner. Then his wife rose suddenly and moved as if to go to her.
“Let me alone!” Lily gasped. She ran out of the door and up to her own room.
She felt that she could not live. No one could live, she thought, and bear such agony. The dimensions of her anger, too great to be contained, were what agonized her.
“To think of their daring to make me a mere blind!” she cried out to her mother, when Mrs. Dodge followed her. “To think they dared! It’s the treachery of it—the insolence of it! I can’t live and be made a mere blind! I can’t, Mamma!”
XXI
MRS. CROMWELL’S NIECE
IN THE meantime, touching these mothers and daughters, there was a figure not thus far appeared among them, yet destined to be for a while their principal topic and interest. She was, indeed, at this time, a lonely figure, a niece of Mrs. Cromwell’s but not well known to her and living a day’s rail journey to the westward. On the November day of Lily Dodge’s agony this niece of Mrs. Cromwell’s was as agonized as Lily.
Each thought herself the unhappiest soul in the world, and yet, with greater wisdom, each might have known that no girl can ever think herself the unhappiest but that, at the same time, other girls—somewhere—will be thinking the same thing and suffering as sadly. The lonely niece’s tragedy was as dark as Lily’s, but came about in a different way.
The group of girls who had happened to meet at the corner of Maple Street and Central Avenue that morning was like the groups their mothers had sometimes formed, years before, on the same corner. This is to say, it was not unlike any other group of young but marriageable maidens pausing together by chance at a corner in the “best residence section” of a town of forty or fifty thousand inhabitants, anywhere in the land.