CHAPTER ONE
Alexina Blair, at twenty, returned from school to her uncle’s home with but small emotion, as, at fourteen, she had left with little regret, yet the shady streets, the open front doors, the welcomes called from up-stairs windows as she passed—evidences that she was back among her own people in the South—all at once made her glad to be here.
How could she have felt emotion over a mere return to Uncle Austen’s house? She might have felt enthusiasm over Nelly, but Nelly was married to the gardener at her old asylum and a Katy had taken her place. The house was the same. If only its stone façade might be allowed to mellow, to grey a little! But, newly cleaned, it stood coldly immaculate in its yard of shaven lawn set about with clipped shrubberies. As for her uncle, Alexina found herself applying the same adjectives to him, shaven, immaculate, cold.
She wondered what he thought of her, but Uncle Austen never made personal remarks.
Aunt Harriet, on joining her niece in the East early in the summer, had looked at her consideringly. She seemed pleased.
“Why,” she said, “Alexina, you are a Tennyson young person, tall and most divinely—you are a little more intense in your colouring than is usual with a Blair. I’m glad.”
The somewhat doubtful smile on the girl’s face deepened as if a sudden radiance leaped into it. She seized her aunt’s hand. “Oh,” she said, “you’re very nice, Aunt Harriet.”
Harriet laughed, rather pleased than not, but she still was studying the girl. “She is impulsive and she doesn’t look set,” the aunt was telling herself—was it gratefully? “perhaps she is less Blair than I thought.”
Austen Blair too, in fact, now viewed his niece with complacency—she fulfilled the Blair requirements—but he talked of other things.