Wally had taken a house near the country club—one of those brick mansions surrounded by trees and lawns which are somehow reminiscent of titled society and fox hunters in buckskin and scarlet. There Helen was soon working her way to the leadership of the younger set.
She seldom called at the house on the hill.
"I'm generally dated up for the evening, and you're never there in the daytime. So I have to drop in and see you here," she said one afternoon, giving Mary a surprise visit at the office. "Do you, know you're getting to be fashionable?" she continued.
"Who? Me?"
"Yes. You. Nearly everywhere we went, they began quizzing us as soon as they found Miss Spencer was a cousin of mine."
Mary noted Helen's self-promotion to the head of the cousinship, but she kept her usual tranquil expression.
"It's because she's Mrs. Cabot now," she thought. "Perhaps she wouldn't have called at all if these people hadn't mentioned me!"
But when Helen arose to go, Mary revised her opinion of the reason for her cousin's call.
"Well, I must be going," said Helen, rising. "I'll drop in and see Burdon for a few minutes on my way out."
"That's it," thought Mary, and her reflections again taking upon themselves that terrible frankness which can seldom be put in words, she added to herself, "Poor Wally…. I was always afraid of it…."