“You aren’t taking them with you—after promising Eileen that she might spend the summer with her cousin, Alice Larimore?”
“A nice rest I would have—dragging two children around with me!”
“They don’t need to have their bottles fixed.” David smiled in spite of his perplexity. “I had counted on this summer—to break up the infatuation for young Marksley. I thought you agreed with me. It was your solution. You told me not to say anything about it until vacation, and that you would send Eileen away.”
David might have spared his breath. The telegram was already on the wire.
III
Sylvia Penrose came home in time for commencement. It was her first visit since the gold-lined catastrophe whereby she was shorn of the coveted “Mrs. Professor,” and she brought with her more pretty clothes than anyone in Springdale had dreamed of—outside a department store. Her father watched her uneasily, the first evening. He saw a marked change in her, and the quality of it disturbed him. Could a child of his acquire such a degree of cynical world-wisdom in a brief ten months? Had Sylvia changed, or was he seeing her for the first time, as she was?
David was not given to introspection. The chambers of his heart were filled with the ghosts of dreams and longings that had perished ... yet would not lie quiet in the graves to which his acquiescent mind had consigned them. One could always take refuge from the hurt of life in the tangible things that life had imposed. He took refuge, now, in his wife’s vivid charm, her spontaneous return to health and buoyancy. Barring a certain smugness, that had come to be an essential fibre of her mental woof, she was amazingly attractive.
“You might easily pass for Mrs. Penrose’s sister,” Judith exclaimed, astonished at the apparition of Lavinia in a cameo pink negligée with wide frills of cream lace. And, Lavinia, smarting under the lash of her daughter’s comments regarding the morning jacket—and the foolish old women who tried to prolong youth by such ill-considered devices—turned to preen herself before the mirror.
She had fully intended to prime Sylvia, with regard to Larimore and the dangerous widow; but that burst of spontaneous praise disarmed her. She did not, however, neglect to make plain her intentions in another quarter. Hal Marksley was to be treated with proper respect. It would not be a bad idea to have the engagement—the wedding, even—consummated before her return from Bromfield. Any one with a grain of sense must know that a fellow as popular and rich as Hal—with half the girls in town after him—would not stand such snubbing as he had received from the men of the household. He was of age ... and Eileen could easily pass herself off for eighteen or twenty if she did up her hair and went to Greenville where she was not known. Papa and Larimore were absolutely insane not to see that a girl with Eileen’s impetuous nature.... Mrs. Trench did not finish the sentence. She and Sylvia understood each other.