XXX
"Thicker Than Water"
Essie Tisdale pulled aside the coarse lace curtains starched to asbesteroid stiffness which draped the front windows of the upstairs parlor in the Terriberry House, and looked with growing interest at an excited and rapidly growing group on the wide sidewalk in front of the post-office.
Such gatherings in Crowheart nearly always portended a fight, but since the hub of the fast widening circle appeared to be Mr. Percy Parrott gesticulating wildly with a newspaper, she concluded that it was merely a sensational bit of news which had come from the outside world. Yet the citizens of Crowheart were not given to exhibiting concern over any happening which did not directly concern themselves, and Dr. Lamb was running. From a hurried walk he broke into a short-stepped, high-kneed prance which was like the action of an English cob, while from across the street dashed Sohmes, the abnormally fat butcher, clasping both hands over his swaying abdomen to lessen the jar.
She turned from the window, and one of the waves of gladness which kept rising within her again swept over her as she realized that the affairs of Crowheart meant nothing to her now. A gulf, invisible as yet, but real as her own existence, lay between her and the life of which she had been a part such a little time before.
She looked about her at the cotton plush furniture of dingy red, at the marble-topped centre table upon whose chilly surface a large, gilt-edged family Bible reposed—placed there by Mrs. Terriberry in the serene confidence that its fair margins would never be defiled through use. Beside the Bible, lay the plush album with its Lombroso-like villainous gallery of countenances upon which transient vandals had pencilled mustaches regardless of sex. She looked at the fly-roost of pampas grass in the sky-blue vase on the shelf from which hung an old-gold lambriquin that represented the highest art of the Kensington cult—water lilies on plush—and at the crowning glory of the parlor, a pier glass in a walnut frame.
It was tawdry and cheap and offended her eye, but it was exclusively her own and she looked about her with a keen thrill of pleasure because of the condition which her occupancy of it represented. Somehow it seemed years ago that she had walked around the hole in the ingrain carpet in the bare room which looked out upon the heap of tin-cans and corrals of the Terriberry House.
Through the door which opened into her bed-chamber she saw the floor littered with boxes and papers, the new near-silk petticoat draping a chair, the new near-tailored suit which represented the "last cry" from the General Merchandise Store, the Parisian hat which the clairvoyant milliner had seen in a trance and trimmed from memory, but the lines of which suggested that the milliner's astral body had practised a deception and projected itself no further than 14th Street.