“The Three Girls’ Alliance,” smiled Mrs. Carson. “Drive back to town, please Ben. I must do my marketing.”
As she rode off, Annie Laurie looked at Azalea in a puzzled way.
“How quiet she is,” she said. “I can’t make her out. Nothing seems to matter to her, yet she’s always doing good. I never heard of anyone who did so much good. Can you understand her?”
Azalea shook her head.
“No—and yet a great sorrow, such as hers—it makes you still, I reckon. My mother—I call Mrs. McBirney my mother, you know—is still. Yet she has lost only one child, and little Molly died right in her arms. But Mrs. Carson lost her three sons in a theatre fire in Chicago, and it did something to her, I suppose. The heart went out of her, though not the goodness.”
“Oh, dear no,” agreed Annie Laurie, “not the goodness.”
They left their outer wraps in the vacant schoolroom, and then made their way up the wide mahogany stairs, with the gleaming white banisters and mahogany rail. Curious old prints lined the side of the wall, and Annie Laurie wanted to pause and look at them, but Azalea urged her on.
“If you stopped to look at every interesting thing in this house,” she said, “you’d never get anywhere.”
They went on past the floor where the bedrooms were, and then up a narrower flight of stairs to the third story.
“Half of this story is Carin’s,” explained Azalea. “The servants sleep in the other half.”