“There was a destroyer in Cohasset Bay last summer,—anchored right off the Yacht Club,—and I saw two of the officers on shore one day.... I don’t know what their names were, of course, but during the war I knew several of the boys in the reserves. Asa Pulitzer was a boatswain’s mate; ... I think that’s what he was.”
Jeannette turned an indulgent smile upon Miss Holland.
“Asa Pulitzer is the local grocer’s son.”
“Well, I don’t care if he is!” protested Etta. “He made good——”
Mrs. Sedgwick rustled downstairs at this moment, making a timely entrance. She carried Etta off, with assurance of returning in time for tea.
“Well-l,” said Jeannette comfortably, as the pleasant hour of companionship and confidences began. “You don’t look as if you’d been ill!”
“Not ill exactly; it’s this wretched rheumatism that will not get better.”
Miss Holland’s tone was not complaining; indeed she always spoke with remarkable placidity. Jeannette regarded her with all her old admiration. There was an unusual aristocratic quality about Miss Holland that never failed to stir her. She was white-haired, now, fragile and thin looking, and there was an uncertainty about her movements, but she still bore herself with distinction,—a gentlewoman to her finger-tips. Even more than the air of gentility that surrounded her, Jeannette esteemed the shrewd brain, nimble wit and judgment of this woman. It seemed a sad and sorry thing to her that so splendid a personality, so fine an intellect should have had so little opportunity for self-expression in the world, and that at sixty, Miss Holland should be no more than what she seemed: an old maid, growing yearly more and more crippled, passing what days remained to her with her nephew and her nephew’s family, somewhat of a problem, somewhat in the way! Of course they loved her; Jeannette knew that Commander Sedgwick was devoted to his aunt and treated her with as much respect and affection as ever son did his mother, but, after all, on the brink of old age, Miss Holland’s course was run, and how little she had to show for all her years of toil and faithfulness! She had spent her life at an underling’s desk and given her wisdom and her strength to a business that had paid her barely enough to support herself and make it possible for her to give her nephew his profession!
“Miss Holland,” Jeannette asked impulsively, “what did the Corey Company pay you towards the end of your employment there?”
“Fifty dollars a week for the last five years I was with them.”