Courtney understood what that beginning meant. But she ignored. "And," she went on, busying herself with curtains and fastenings, "we'll move the table in front of this big window. I like breakfast near the window in summer, near the fire in winter."
Nanny lowered upon the small straight young figure, so bright and graceful. "Miss Eudosia—" she began fiercely. Again she checked herself, but it was to say with bitterness, "But then she's dead—and forgot."
"No, indeed!" protested Courtney. "You'd have thought she'd gone only a few months ago instead of four years if you'd heard Richard talking about her yesterday. And I'm sure she'd have done what I'm suggesting if she'd happened to think of it." Then with a look that might have softened any but a woman resolved to hate another woman: "Do try to humor me in little things, Nanny. I'll be very meek about things that do matter. I've had no experience in keeping house. You'll teach me, won't you?"
Nanny stood inflexible, her wrinkled hands folded tightly at the waist line of her black alpaca. She could not help Courtney displace that table from its ancient site. It was as if this frivolous, whistling, useless chit of an ornamental wife were violating the sacred Eudosia's coffin—the graves of all the Vaughans—for traditions are graves, and Nanny, like all who live by tradition, lived among graves. After a time Courtney, more nervous under those angry eyes than she showed, got the table at the open window. The room was livable now, and after she had rearranged the dishes the table looked invitingly human. But her buoyant young enthusiasm had oozed away. With wistful gaze out over prim lawns and flower beds, stiff and staid as Sunday, she said: "I guess I'll bring Richard to breakfast."
"He et before he went."
"Oh!" Courtney's tone showed that she was hurt. But she instantly brightened. "I'll get him to come and sit with me while I have breakfast."
A covert sneering smile in the depths of Nanny's eyes made her flush angrily. "If I was you I wouldn't interrupt him," said the old woman. "He don't allow it."
"How absurd!" cried Courtney. But straightway she was amazed and shocked at herself—on this her first morning in the new and beautiful life, to be drawn nearer a vulgar squabble than in all her nineteen years—and with an old woman toward whom it would be cowardice not to be forbearing. "I'm cross because I'm hungry," she said contritely. "While breakfast's coming I'll run down for him."
"He's set in his ways," said Nanny.
"He'll not mind me—this once." And she took up her train and went by the long French window to the broad veranda with its big fluted pillars. At the end steps she paused. Yes, it was summer in the Vaughan grounds as elsewhere. But that prodigal wanton had there been caught, had had her tresses sleeked and bound, her luxuriant figure corseted and clad in the most repellant classical severity. Courtney, of the eyes keen for color and form and fitness of things, felt rebuked and subdued once more. She glanced farther round, saw Nanny's parchment face and sinister gaze watching and hating her. There is a limit beyond which youth refuses to be suppressed and compressed, and defiantly expands in more than its natural gay audacity. This climax of Nanny, representative of Vaughans not so rigid in death as they had been in life, was just the necessary little-too-much. With a laugh and a toss of the head, she swung her skirts very high indeed above her pretty ankles and ran like a young antelope across the lawn, and into and along the path leading away toward the eastern part of the grounds. Through a carefully artificial thicket of lilacs, elders, and snowballs she sped, then through a small wood with not a spray of underbrush anywhere. She came out in a clearing at the water's edge. Before her, one of its walls rising sheer from the retaining wall of the lake, stood the laboratory.