“However, Gail dear, you have shown a degree of carefulness which I am delighted to find in you,” complimented Aunt Helen. “If you handle all your affairs so sensibly, you have a brilliant future before you.”
“I must be an awful worry to you, Aunt Helen,” observed Gail, and walking over, she slipped her arm around Mrs. Davies’ neck, and kissed her, and looked around for her chocolate box.
Gail’s maid came in, and Mrs. Davies bade her sister’s niece good-night most cordially, and retired with a great load off her mind; and half an hour later the lights in Gail’s pretty little suite went out.
If she lay long hours looking out at the pale stars, if, in the midst of her calm logic, she suddenly buried her face in her pillows and sobbed silently, if, toward morning, she awoke with a little cry to find her face and her hands hot, all these things were but normal and natural. It is enough to know that she came to her breakfast bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked and smiling with the pleasant greetings of the day, and picked up the papers casually, and lit upon the newest sensation of the free and entirely uncurbed metropolitan press!
The free and entirely uncurbed metropolitan press had found Vedder Court, and had made it the sudden focus of the public eye. Those few who were privileged to know intimately the workings of that adroit master of the public welfare, Tim Corman, could have recognised clearly his fine hand in the blaze of notoriety which obscure Vedder Court had suddenly received. After having endured the contamination and contagion of the Market Square Church tenements for so many years, the city had, all at once, discovered that the condition was unbearable! The free and entirely uncurbed metropolitan press had taken up, with great enthusiasm, the work of poking the finger of scorn at Vedder Court. It had published photographs of the disreputable old sots of buildings, and, where they did not seem to drip enough, the artists had retouched them. It had sent budding young Poes and Dickenses down there to write up the place in all the horrors which a lurid fancy could portray, or a hectic mind conceive; and it had given special prominence to the masterly effort of one litterateur, who never went near the place, but, after dancing ably until three A.M., had dashed up to his lonely room, and had wrapped a wet towel around his head, and had conceived of the scene as it would look in absolute darkness, with one pale lamp gleaming on the Doréian faces of the passersby! It had sent the sob sisters there in shoals to interview the down-trodden, and, above all things, it had put prominently before the public eye the immense profit which Market Square Church wrung from this organised misery!
Gail turned sick at heart as she read. Uncle Jim permitted four morning papers to come to the house, and the dripping details, with many variations, were in all of them. She glanced over toward the rectory and the dignified old church standing beyond it, with mingled indignation and humiliation. A sort of ignominy seemed to have descended upon it, like a man whose features seem coarsened from the instant he is doomed to wear prison stripes; and the fact which she particularly resented was that a portion of the disgrace of Market Square Church seemed to have descended upon her. She could not make out why this should be; but it was. Aunt Grace Sargent, bustling about to see that Gail was supplied with more kinds of delicacies than she could possibly sample, saw that unmistakable look of distress on Gail’s face, and went straight up to her sister Helen, the creases of worry deep in her brow.
Mrs. Helen Davies was having her coffee in bed, and she continued that absorbing ceremony while she considered her sister’s news.
“I did not think that Gail was so deeply affected by the occurrences of last night,” she mused; “but of course she could not sleep, and she’s full of sympathy this morning, and afraid that maybe she made a mistake, and feels perfectly wretched.”
Grace Sargent sat right down.
“Did the rector propose?” she breathlessly inquired.