“No, thank you; I couldn’t leave Grandma,” she answered.
And went out, burning with resentment against him. He knew it; as she drove off he watched her from the window with a sigh of regret. Her pitiful ignorance, her enterprise, her obstinacy, touched him profoundly. His heart positively ached for her.
Alas, Mr. Petersen! By reason of his compassion, forever lost!
CHAPTER SEVEN
I
Behold Minnie, a week or so later, harnessing Bess, this time for a mission authorised and altogether blameless. She was going to the station to meet Frankie, who was coming home for a week-end.
For days she and her grandmother had been making preparations, partly from an affectionate wish to please Frankie, and partly from a desire to impress her with their own importance and progressiveness. They had both an unspoken but perfectly understood feeling that it would be intolerable for her to say or to think that everything was unchanged since she had left. The old lady was specially proud of a pile of copies of a weekly magazine which she had audaciously subscribed for, seduced by a nice young agent.
As for Minnie, she had something up her sleeve which she knew would astonish and amaze, and utterly kill any news Frankie might bring. She whistled as she worked in the stable with a slightly malicious delight in anticipating the shock. Although she was terribly nervous, too. She had not yet had occasion to try her strength, and she was afraid that they—the practical, experienced wage-earning Frankie, and the quite incomprehensible old lady, might crush her. She was bound and determined to win, but she wasn’t altogether sure....
She drove off in her usual majestic fashion, agreeably conscious of a new hat. In order that she might compete upon equal terms with Frankie, her grandmother had presented it to her, bought with money withheld from Heaven knows how many creditors. A triumphal progress through the town, and she came up the gravel drive to the station with something faintly resembling a trot. There, however, she was forced to descend, and hold the old mare by the bridle, patting her nose, trying with intense seriousness to soothe her. She couldn’t bear to see her start and tremble, with that distressing rolling of her brown eyes, at the first sound of the engine’s whistle. She had suggested that Frances should walk as far as the drug-store, so that Bess could wait there, out of sight of the trains that so disturbed her, but Frances wrote back with some spirit that she did not intend to lug a heavy bag four blocks for the sake of a silly old horse. She threatened to hire a hack, and rather than suffer that affront to the Defoe pride, Minnie was ready to make great concessions.
She was too much taken up with the horse to see her sister at first, and Frances had an oddly illuminating view of her, an impersonal view. It seemed to her that she had never before looked at Minnie without Minnie’s looking back at her; this was not the Minnie familiar to her as her own reflection in the glass, but a stranger, a solemn, swarthy little woman, very countrified, inclined to plumpness, looking older than her years. She felt terribly sorry for her, hurried to her in affectionate remorse for having so seen her.