“How fine!” exulted Linda. “He must have liked the head and tail pieces I drew for his other article, so he wants the same for this, and if he is well paid for his article, maybe in time, after I’ve settled for my hearth motto, he will pay me something for my work. Gal-lum-shus!”
As she opened the letter from Marian she slowly shook her head.
“Drat the luck,” she muttered, “no good news here.”
Slowly and absorbedly she read:
Dearest Linda:
No telegram to send. I grazed the first prize and missed the second because Henry Anderson wins with plans so like mine that they are practically duplicates. I have not seen the winning plans. Mr. Snow told me as gently as he could that the judges had ruled me out entirely. The winning plans are practically a reversal of mine, more professionally drawn, and no doubt the specifications are far ahead of mine, as these are my weak spot, although I have worked all day and far into the night on the mathematics of house building. Mr. Snow was very kind, and terribly cut up about it. I made what I hope was a brave fight, I did so believe in those plans that I am afraid to say just how greatly disappointed I am. All I can do is to go to work again and try to find out how to better my best, which I surely put into the plans I submitted. I can’t see how Henry Anderson came to hit upon some of my personal designs for comforts and conveniences. I had hoped that no man would think of my especial kitchen plans. I rather fancied myself as a benefactor to my sex, an emancipator from drudgery, as it were. I had a concealed feeling that it required a woman who had expended her strength combating the construction of a devilish kitchen, to devise some of my built-in conveniences, and I worked as carefully on my kitchen table, as on any part of the house. If I find later that the winning plans include these things I shall believe that Henry Anderson is a mind reader, or that lost plans naturally gravitate to him. But there is no use to grouch further. I seem to be born a loser. Anyway, I haven’t lost you and I still have Dana Meade.
I have nothing else to tell you except that Mr. Snow has waited for me two evenings out of the week ever since I wrote you, and he has taken me in his car and simply forced me to drive him for an hour over what appeals to me to be the most difficult roads he could select. So far I have not balked at anything, but he has had the consideration not to direct me to the mountains. He is extremely attractive, Linda, and I do enjoy being with him, but I dread it too, because his grief is so deep and so apparent that it constantly keeps before me the loss of my own dear ones, and those things to which the hymn books refer as “aching voids” in my own life.
But there is something you will be glad to hear. That unknown correspondent of mine is still sending letters, and I am crazy about them. I don’t answer one now until I have mulled over it two or three days and I try to give him as good as he sends.
I judge from your letters that you are keeping at least even with Eileen, and that life is much happier for you. You seem to be broadening. I am so glad for the friendship you have formed with Donald Whiting. My mother and Mrs. Whiting were friends. She is a charming woman and it has seemed to me that in her daughter Louise she has managed a happy compound of old-fashioned straightforwardness and unswerving principle, festooned with happy trimmings of all that is best in the present days. I hope that you do become acquainted with her. She is older than you, but she is the kind of girl I know you would like.
Don’t worry because I have lost again, Linda dear. To-day is my blue day. To-morrow I shall roll up my sleeves and go at it again with all my might, and by and by it is written in the books that things will come right for me. They cannot go wrong for ever.
With dearest love,
Marian.
Linda looked grim as she finished the letter.
“Confound such luck,” she said emphatically. “I do not understand it. How can a man like Henry Anderson know more about comforts and conveniences in a home than a woman with Marian’s experience and comprehension? And she has been gaining experience for the past ten years. That partner of his must be a six-cylinder miracle.”
Linda went to the kitchen, because she was in pressing need of someone to whom to tell her troubles, and there was no one except Katy. What Katy said was energetic and emphatic, but it comforted Linda, because she agreed with it and what she was seeking at the minute was someone who agreed with her. As she went back upstairs, she met Eileen on her way to the front door. Eileen paused and deliberately studied Linda’s face, and Linda stopped and waited quietly until she chose to speak.
“I presume,” said Eileen at last, “that you and Katy would call the process through which you are going right now, ‘taking the bit in your teeth,’ or some poetic thing like that, but I can’t see that you are getting much out of it. I don’t hear the old laugh or the clatter of gay feet as I did before all this war of dissatisfaction broke out. This minute if you haven’t either cried, or wanted to, I miss my guess.”
“You win,” said Linda. “I have not cried, because I make it a rule never to resort to tears when I can help it; so what you see now is unshed tears in my heart. They in no way relate to what you so aptly term my ‘war of dissatisfaction’; they are for Marian. She has lost again, this time the Nicholson and Snow prize in architecture.”