Once and again the bank president, who was wont to command silence, to be granted a respectful hearing in the highest councils of the town, sought to breast the tide of her anger. His interruptions were swept away like spindrift. He wanted to offer financial restitution, since no other was possible. She met the proposal with scorn. Money could not cover up the disgrace of such a consummation. Calvin might rue his bargain, and come back to plead for forgiveness. The desperately proffered balm brought a more bitter outburst. She would not be any man’s second choice. No, the damage was irreparable. It was done.
III
As the man of finance turned the interview over in his mind, a curious balance was struck—and his heart softened towards his son. There might have been other tongue-lashings. No woman could have achieved such fluency without practice. Before he reached the front door of the little bank, Lavinia was in her own room, her compact figure half submerged in the feather bed, her hot tears of shame and chagrin wetting the scarlet stars of the quilt her own deft fingers had pieced. She had lost her temper—it was easily misplaced—but the scene she had raised had no share in her memory of the encounter. Her humiliation blotted all else from view. It was not only that she had aimed at the highest, and lost. She loved Calvin Stone with all the passion of a fiery nature—loved him with a depth and intensity that might be gauged by the hate that loomed on the surface of her wrath. And there was no one in the whole world to whom she could open her heart.
Mrs. Larimore knew there had been a quarrel, a quarrel that outran the morning’s tempest in violence; but when she ventured to ask what the trouble was, Lavinia told her curtly that it was none of her business. Now she stood outside the door, listening to her daughter’s stormy sobbing. She had never been on intimate terms with her children, and the relationship with her eldest daughter was most casual. A headstrong girl. Where she got her ambition—unless it was a heritage from her Grandmother Larimore—no one could say. The other members of the family were easygoing, content with the day’s pleasure and profit. But Lavinia was avid for work, for praise, for position. She would shine as Mrs. Calvin Stone, if ever.... And then Mrs. Larimore began afresh to wonder.
III David
I
Early in the afternoon, when the sun was making furtive efforts to slip past the cloud-guard and repair the damage the rain had wrought, Lavinia stepped briskly from her room, clad in her best blue silk poplin. An hour past she had been bathing her eyes, and her mirror satisfied her that the redness and swelling were all gone. She went straight to her father’s store, across from the bank. Ellen Porter would be there, behind the bookkeeper’s desk.
“I want you to do something for me, Nell,” she began—noting the hollow in her voice, and striving against it. “I want you to take this to Mr. Stone.”