Late Thursday afternoon Mrs. Trench crossed the lawn with tottering steps. She looked incredibly old, with the bloodless lips and the greenish pallor of her sunken cheeks. “No wonder her children are temperamental,” Judith thought, remembering the crispness of her step and the full flush of her dark skin as she crossed that same stretch of grass the previous evening, the plate of rolls in her hand. She came now with no offering of good will. There was set purpose in her eyes. And her mouth ... Judith wondered how she could have thought Eileen’s mouth looked like that. A sleepless night and the bald revelation of Calvin Stone’s sorrow—discussed at the luncheon table as the Bromfield paper was handed about—had reduced her resistive power to its lowest point. When her life stream was full, she had little difficulty concealing the slimy bed of her being. But now, with all her animation ebbed away, she groped within her own turbid depths, blinded by resentment and self-pity until even prudence forsook her. In any other state of mind, she would not have flung down the gauntlet to the one woman on whom she must depend for the furthering of her plans.
“Mrs. Ascott, would you mind going inside? I can’t stand this sunshine. I never could see why David put a door in the west side of this summer house, where the afternoon sun can shine right in your face. But David always bungles things.”
“You are ill. I am so sorry.”
“It’s nothing. I’ll be myself after I’ve had a night’s rest. The fact is, I want to have a plain talk with you.” Judith led the way to the library. With rigid lips, that marred her usual sharp enunciation, she began bluntly. “I feel that it’s my Christian duty to tell you some nasty truths about that Mrs. Nims.”
“Village gossip. I’m sure, Mrs. Trench, I’m not in the least interested.”
An ugly purplish red crept along Lavinia’s corded neck and up over the cheeks to the line of straight black hair.
“But you and Eileen are planning all sorts of intimacy—musical trio with you at the piano, playing accompaniments for the violin and ’cello—and Larimore and his father are terribly vexed. Of course you couldn’t be expected to know anything about the woman ... being a newcomer in the town. And you couldn’t know how important it is to me, right now, not to have my husband displeased.”
It transpired that Eileen had talked too much, at breakfast, that morning ... too many details of her call at the Marksleys’ home, the play the Dramatic Club was putting on, for the benefit of the laboratory fund, in which Hal Marksley had to kiss her, beneath the pale glow of a marvellously devised stage moon.
“The trio was only a tentative suggestion. If Mr. Trench—”
“It isn’t so much his opposition as Larimore’s. He never had any use for the Marksley family—and this big competition coming on. Villa residence, keeper’s lodge, garage and barns. It will mean a great deal to my son to win that commission. And the contract for the construction will be the biggest thing Mr. Trench has had since he put up the new Science Hall.