“Tell me about Eileen. Dr. Schubert is fond of her, I believe.”
“Yes, he sees good in her. He’s about the only one who does. She was sixteen last Sunday, and she’s third year Prep. Goes into college next fall, if she don’t flunk again. She’s getting too big for mamma’s slipper, and I don’t know what is going to become of her. She’s been ugly as sin, ever since mamma heard a Chautauqua lecturer say you had to go in for technique. You know, Eileen plays the violin. And when mamma shuts her up and makes her practice—she gets even by making her fiddle swear. It says ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ and some worse ones, just as plain. And when she’s mad, her eyes get as yellow as cat’s eyes. You never saw yellow eyes, did you?”
“My own look that way, at times—when I’m ill or out of sorts.”
“But they’re the loveliest—like gray violets!” She looked deep into Mrs. Ascott’s eyes, and her own kindled with admiration. “Dr. Schubert told us yours were like Lary’s. But they aren’t, a bit. His are light brown. That barely saves him from being a Trench.”
Manifestly Lavinia had impressed on her family the advantage of looking like the Larimores. And yet, Judith thought she had never seen a finer looking man than David Trench—not so well groomed as his son, and with the gait of a man perennially tired, but with a face that Fra Angelico would have loved to paint.
V
When the elfin child had gone, in response to the ringing of a great bell on the distant campus, Mrs. Ascott sat a long while in smiling silence. Not in years had she been so entertained. Bit by bit she added the child’s revelations to the broken comments of her garrulous gardener. The Duttons had been neighbours of the Trenches in Olive Hill, when Jeff and Dave were fellow workmen, and before Jeff’s baleful visit to the “Jag Institoot” that robbed him of his prowess as a brick mason, along with the appetite for undiluted whiskey. Mrs. Dutton “wasn’t very friendly” because her fortunes had declined until she was compelled to serve as laundress and house-maid to Mrs. Trench’s tenants. But there was a time when she and her husband were glad of a refuge in the rooms above the garage. This small brick structure, it transpired, had been David’s work shop, and here Lary had made his first architectural drawings.
Theodora’s prattle fairly bristled with Lary. Whatever his mother might think of him, in his little sister’s eyes he was the one flawless being. It was he who had supervised the furnishing of Vine Cottage, for a certain Professor Ferguson, a testy little Scot in charge of the department of biology at the college. And Lary and his mother had almost broken heads over some of the details.
Everything about the house was exquisite. Judith thought she knew what Lary would be like—the man who could limit himself to a single dull blue and yellow vase for the library mantel. The external appearance of the cottage had promised fustian ... the fish-scale ornament above the bay-window, the elaborate carvings between the veranda pillars, the somewhat fussy pergola that covered the gravel walk from the kitchen to the garage.
Bare vines were everywhere, swelling with sap and viridescent with eager buds that strove with their armour of winter scales, although it was not yet the end of March. Beds of narcissus and tulips gave promise of early bloom, and already the yellow and white crocus blossoms were starring the withered bluegrass of the front lawns. There was an unwritten law that the lattice which screened the vegetable garden must never carry anything but cypress and Japanese morning glories, and that potatoes must be planted east of the pergola. There were other unwritten “musts” that came to light, day by day, all of them having to do with the garden, over which apparently Mrs. Trench had retained control.