Peggy Raymond's Way; Or, Blossom Time at Friendly Terrace

by Harriet L. Smith

"I can write you letters, dear."

"Letters!" Graham's repetition of the word was anything but flattering to Peggy's epistolary efforts. "Of course," he went on in a milder tone, "I love your letters when I'm away from you. But to read letters instead of talking to you is like—like eating dried apple pie in October."

"It's only a week," said Peggy, but she sighed. And her sigh would have been much more vehement had she dreamed how long that week would prove.

Priscilla writing a little note to Horace Hitchcock did not sigh over the prospect that she could exchange no words with him for seven days. Indeed she was conscious of a profound relief. Recently Horace had taken up the philosophical style in conversation, and Priscilla, as she listened, frequently found herself unable to understand a word he was saying. At first she assumed that this was due to her not having given him sufficiently close attention, and she had chided herself for her wandering thoughts. But things were no better when she listened her hardest. Priscilla knew that she was not a fool. She had finished her junior year in college, and her class standing in all philosophical subjects had been excellent. If she could not understand what Horace was talking about, she felt reasonably sure that the explanation was not in her own intellectual lack but because Horace was talking nonsense. The polysyllables he used so glibly and the epigrammatic phrases which to the unthinking might have seemed indicative of erudition and originality, when Priscilla came to analyze them seemed to have no more relation to one another than glittering beads strung on a wire. Priscilla was driven to the conclusion that Horace had been reading literature considerably over his head, and that he was reproducing for her benefit a sort of pot-pourri of recollections, blended without much regard to their original connection.

But this was not the only reason why Priscilla had a sense of relief in writing to ask Horace not to call for a week. As the days went on, the thought of her silver wedding had been increasingly painful. Horace's affectations, to which for a time she had deliberately closed her eyes, were continually more glaringly in evidence. Once, when they were alone, Priscilla had tremulously hinted that perhaps they had been mistaken in supposing themselves fitted for each other, and Horace's reception of the suggestion had terrified her unutterably. He had addressed himself to the stars and asked if it were true that there was neither faith nor constancy in womankind. Then he had looked at Priscilla, with an expression of agony, and said, "I thought it was you who was to heal my tortured heart, and now you have failed me." But when he began to put his hand to his forehead and mutter that life was only a series of disappointments and that the sooner it was over the better, Priscilla, white to the lips, had assured him that he had misunderstood her. Her efforts to restore his serenity were not altogether successful and she did not feel at ease about him until, a day or two later, she saw his name among the guests at a dinner dance, at Mrs. Sidney Vanderpool's country house. But the interview had confirmed her certainty that there was no escaping the snare into which she had walked with eyes wide open. And for that reason a week free from Horace's society was more than welcome.

The silent week starting Friday morning had seemed rather a joke to begin with. At four breakfast tables, four girls who contributed not a syllable to the conversation, contributed largely, nevertheless, to the family gaiety. But by noon the humorous phase of the situation had passed, at least for the four chiefly concerned. All of them went about with an expression of Spartan-like resolve, blended with not a little anxiety. For when people have been chattering animatedly every day for fifteen or twenty years, it is very easy for an exclamation to escape their lips in spite of resolutions to the contrary.

Peggy probably had the hardest time of any one. For her brother, Dick, although fond of calling attention to a fuzzy excrescence which he denominated his mustache, was as fond of mischief as he had ever been. And while undoubtedly he would have been sorry to have Peggy break her vow of silence, and lose the hundred dollars which meant another year in school for little Myrtle Burns, he nevertheless subjected his sister to any number of nerve-racking tests. A crash as of a falling body in an upstairs room, a cry of anguish from the cellar, a loud knocking on the ceiling of her room apparently by ghostly fingers, were among the devices Dick used for the testing of his sister. On each occasion Peggy started convulsively, but somehow or other choked back the cry that rose to her lips, "Oh, what is it? What is the matter?"

Though Dick was the only one of the Raymond family who made deliberate attempts to betray his sister into unguarded speech, Mrs. Raymond, innocent as were her intentions, was almost as much of a stumbling-block. "Now what do you think, Peggy," she would begin, "had we better try Turners again or—" And then catching sight of the Joan-of-Arc expression on Peggy's face, she would break off her question in the middle, and cry, "Oh, dear, I entirely forgot! I shall certainly be glad when this ridiculous week is over."

There was one advantage in a week of silence. The girls were allowed to write letters, and they took full advantage of that permission. They wrote to aunts and uncles and cousins and all sorts of neglected relatives. They wrote to old friends, who had moved to other cities. They wrote to the girls they had come to know in their work as farmerettes. They wrote—all four of them—to Lucy Haines, a country girl they had helped one summer vacation, now a successful teacher. If all weeks had been like this one, the postman who collected the mail from the Friendly Terrace letter-box would have needed an assistant. Peggy also wrote to Graham every day, and she tried to make her letters as sprightly and entertaining as possible, so that he should not miss their daily talks so much. But under the circumstances there was not a great deal to tell, and if it had not been for Dick's machinations, which Peggy repeated in much detail, she feared that her missives would have proved dull reading.