That a girl like Margaret Berkeley could have become involved in a love affair and an actual betrothal with a man like Daniel Leitzel, while apparently inexplicable, becomes, in view of her unique history and present circumstances, not only plausible, but almost inevitable.
Her entanglement with him may be dated from a certain evening just twenty-four hours before she met or even heard of him, when a little episode, trivial enough in itself, opened her eyes to an ugly fact in her relation with her sister to which she had been rather persistently blind.
She had been radiantly happy all that day because of the unusual circumstance that she had something delightful to anticipate for the evening. Her godmother, who lived in Charleston, had 'phoned out to Berkeley Hill to invite her to go with her to see Nazimova in "Hedda Gabler"; and as Margaret had seen only three plays in all the twenty-five years of her life (though she had avidly read every classic drama in the English and French languages) she was greatly excited at the prospect before her. So barren had her girlhood been of youthful pleasures, so sombre and uneventful her daily routine, and so repressed every natural, restless instinct toward brightness and happiness, that the idea of seeing a great dramatic performance loomed big before her as an intoxicating delight. All day, alone in her isolated suburban home, in charge of her elder sister's three small children and of the two rather decrepit negro servants of the great old place, she had gone tripping and singing about the house. She had been quite unable to settle down to the prosaic work of mending the week's laundry, or of wrestling with the intricacies of Henry James' difficult style in "The Golden Bowl" in which, the night before, she had been passionately absorbed.
She could scarcely wait for her sister Harriet to come home from town, where she was attending a young matrons' luncheon party, so eager was she to tell her of the treat she was going to have.
"She will be so glad for me. I've scarcely been outside the hedge for a month, and she has been having such a gay time herself—she's so popular. She'll be so glad I'm going!" she repeated to herself, trying to ignore the doubt in her heart on that point.
But when at half-past four in the afternoon Harriet returned, the blow fell upon Margaret.
"Harriet, dear!" she exultantly greeted her sister with her splendid news the moment the latter came into the house, "Aunt Virginia is going to take me to see Nazimova to-night! Oh!" She laughed aloud, and danced about the spacious hall in her delight, while her sister, a very comely young matron of thirty-five, leisurely removed her wraps.
"But Walter and I are going," Harriet casually remarked as she tossed her cloak over a carved, high-backed chair. "The editor of the Bulletin gave Walter two tickets as part payment for some legal business Walter did for him. Of course you and I can't both be away from the children. Has the baby had her five o'clock bottle?"
"It isn't quite five yet."
"Will you see that she gets it, dearie? I'm so dead tired, I'll have to rest before dinner if I'm going into the city again to-night. Will you attend to it?"