I should be very pleased if you would dine with us this evening at half past seven.
Most sincerely yours,
Maude Lanier.
She had sent a messenger boy with her acceptance, because she knew that that was what Denis would have wished; but she couldn’t make the best of it, couldn’t recapture the smiling, careless bravery that Denis so loved in her. She had had courage enough to leave her dear, shabby old home at eighteen and go off to try her luck in the wide world. She had been able to give Denis the most gallant, bright farewell. She had faced more than one black moment in her twenty years, but she could not face Denis’s family untroubled.
She had given herself two hours to dress in, and she needed every second of the time. Her prettiness seemed to ebb away with every breath she drew. That radiant hair was an unruly tangle when she tried to put it up. The brightness fled from her face, leaving it pale and strained. The dark dress that Denis had admired so much was admirable no longer, but austerely plain and grievously unbecoming. Emily could have wept at her own image in the mirror.
“I look so—so mean!” she cried, with a sob. “Such a meek, scared, silly little object!”
This wouldn’t do. The thing that the serious Denis had loved best of all in her was her absurd, delightful gayety. She straightened her shoulders and drew a long breath.
“You know,” she said to her own reflection, “Denis picked you out from all the other girls in the world, and now you’ve simply got to show the reason why. Even if you’re hideous, you needn’t be dismal. Here goes!”
So she managed a smile, after all.
She had been Mrs. Denis Lanier for only five weeks, had had a check book and money to spend for the same short time, and it was still a little intoxicating. She ordered a taxi from her room by telephone, and when it was announced she went down into the lobby almost her own debonair self again. Think of Mrs. Denis Lanier, in a fur coat and a pearl necklace, getting into her taxi!
Her father was a professor in a small New England college, and Emily had been brought up with a full understanding of the woeful discrepancy between the tastes and the incomes of professors and their families. She had learned to be happy without any of the things for which her young heart thirsted. It was the very essence of her nature to be happy; but it cannot be denied that she was a hundred times more happy now that she possessed some share of worldly goods. She wished[Pg 161] and tried to be high-minded, and still she couldn’t forget her pearl necklace.