“Those people are always envious,” said Mrs. Anson. “Governesses and companions—they’re not exactly servants, you know, and yet they’re not—well, they’re simply out of everything.”
“I wish she’d stay out altogether!” said Serena.
Geraldine Moriarty wished the same thing. As she stepped out through the long window of the breakfast room to the lawn, she wished that she need never set foot in that house again. She hated it, she hated the life there, and at times she came dangerously close to hating the people in it.
For, though Serena’s conclusion that the girl was “as hard as nails” was an exaggeration, there was a grain of truth in it. She had, for her nineteen years, a character remarkably definite and independent. She had fortitude, courage, and the pride of Lucifer. She had come here, penniless, solitary, and so young, direct from the almost cloistered life she had led with her invalid mother, and not for one instant had she been dazzled or swayed by the luxury and the feverish gayety about her. She stayed because she knew no other way to earn her bread, but all her salary she put into a savings bank, and would not touch a penny of it. When there was enough, she meant to go away. She would learn typing and shorthand, find work in an office, and be done with this existence which she hated.
She lived here in exile, utterly alien and lonely, among these people whom she neither comprehended nor pitied. Her people had been gentlefolk. She had been brought up in a tradition of dignity, honor, and reserve, and she clung to that tradition with all the strength of her loyal heart. What her people had been, she would be. Their ways were the right ways. Their manners, their speech, their tastes, formed the standards by which all others should be judged. And, so judged, Serena and her friends were damned. Geraldine saw no good in them at all. They were base, heartless, and vulgar.
She walked across the lawn to the sea wall at the foot of the garden, and jumped down to the beach, a few feet below. She wanted to be alone for a little while in the fresh, sweet summer morning, in the sun and the salt wind, and to forget the monstrous thing she had seen; but she could not forget. In anger, in contempt, she was obliged to remember Serena’s face at the mention of that man’s name.
Evidently Serena “loved” this man with the mountebank name, and her friends seemed to think it a charming idyl—the “love” of a woman of forty, who had divorced one husband and was living in constant bickering with a second. The fact of her being married was simply a side issue. Faith and honor had no meaning at all for these people, and love—that was what they called “love”!
II
The summer day was drawing to a close. The shadows of the trees were long upon the grass, the sun was sinking through a sky wistful and delicate, faint rose and yellow.
There was a blessed quiet all through the house. Serena and her friends had certainly intended to be back for tea, but they had not come. They never could do what they meant to do. Obstacles intervened, and they were not well equipped for dealing with obstacles. It took so little to stop them, to bar a road, to turn them off toward a new destination. They had not come back, and Geraldine was having her tea alone in the library, reading a book as she sipped it.