The young man, watching her and hearing her, was quite as much moved as Cousin Ronald could have desired—but in the wrong direction.
Her song ended, Cousin Ronald and Ordway withdrew to the study, Cousin Winnie and her child to the kitchen. Twenty minutes passed; then Ordway reappeared. With a curtsy almost old-fashioned, Lucy went with him to the door, even across the threshold.
The wind slammed the door behind her, and for a few minutes she stood in the porch, talking to the young man. Cousin Winnie, in the kitchen, heard them; they were discussing a new play. Lucy said yes, she did like the theater, but she didn’t go very often now. And she had heard “The Maddened Brute” spoken of as a wonderful play—a really big thing. Cousin Winnie missed a little here, owing to her duties; the next thing she heard was Lucy saying good night to Mr. Ordway.
It had been a very brief conversation, but Ordway, as he walked to the station in the windy dark, imagined that she had said a great deal. He thought, somehow, that she had told him what a miserable existence she led in the historic cottage. What a darned shame!
V
Lucy was sitting at a small table by the dining room window. She had bought a tube of cement, and with it she was mending a varied assortment of antique china she had discovered in a cupboard. It was raining outside, a chill, steady downpour. And the room was dim and cold, and it was a dismal world.
“I wish I was thirty!” she thought. Because at that advanced age she believed that one could be content to live in a historic cottage, and not mind dullness, or rain, or anything, very much. At thirty she would be content to devote her life to the ruined Cousin Ronald and her heroic mother. Yet, in a way, she disliked the thought of being thirty. She disliked all her thoughts this afternoon.
“As far as that goes,” she reflected, pursuing a certain familiar line, “I don’t have to wait for anybody to invite me. I can take mother to see ‘The Maddened Brute’ this very Saturday, if I like. I’ve got enough money for that. Only, mother wouldn’t like that sort of play. Anyhow, I don’t care!”
Carefully she cemented a handle on an ancient sugar basin; then, setting it down to dry, she looked out of the window. The postman, in a rubber coat, was coming along the muddy road.
“I don’t care!” she said again. She was not the sort of girl who waited with the slightest interest for letters that people had said they were going to write a week ago. Let them write, or not write; what cared she?