Isolde hadn’t included Vicky, but then Vicky couldn’t want anything. She wasn’t afraid to fly in the faces of the Trustees and the whole League and they wouldn’t mind if she did. She was as clever as she was pretty. She could take the old dresses which Mrs. Custer and Mrs. White, the Trustees’ wives, and Mrs. Deering whom Isolde had visited in Chicago, and Godmother Jocelyn sent every now and then and make the stunningest new dresses. And once an artist from New York had painted her portrait and exhibited it in Paris and had won a medal for it. The League ladies approved of that and always told of it.
Vicky had whole processions of beaux who came and crowded in the chairs in the front room or sat on the broad window sills of the open windows smoking while she talked to them or played for them. Isolde’s few beaux were not noisy and jolly like Vick’s—they all looked as though the League might have picked them out from some assortment. They usually read to Isolde verses of their own or made her read them some of Dad’s. Maybe, Sidney’s thoughts shot out at a new angle—maybe Isolde did not like beaux who were poets, liked Vick’s kind of men better.
Trude had only one beau and Sidney had never seen him because Trude had had him when she was visiting Aunt Edith White. Trude and Isolde had whispered a great deal about him and Trude had let Isolde read his letters. Then a letter had come that had made Trude look all queer and white and Isolde, after she had read it, had gone to Trude and put her arms around her neck and Isolde only did a thing like that when something dreadful happened. Sidney had hoped that she might find the letter lying around somewhere so carelessly that she could be pardoned for reading it, but though she had looked everywhere she had never found it. She had had to piece together Trude’s romance from the fabric of her agile imagination.
Sidney had often tried to make herself hate the old house. Though it was a jolly, rambly place it was so very down-at-the heels and the light that poured in through the windows made things look even barer and shabbier. Nancy Stevens lived in one of the new bungalows near the school and it was beautiful with shiny furniture and rugs that felt like woolly bed slippers under one’s tread and two pairs of curtains at each window and Nancy’s own room was all pink even to the ruffled stuff hung over her bed like a tent. But Sidney had once heard Mrs. Milliken say to Isolde: “I hope, dear girl, that you will not be tempted to change this fine old house in any way—to leave it just as your father lived in it is the greatest tribute we can pay to his memory.” After that Sidney knew there was no use hinting for even one pair of curtains. But her sisters had seemed quite contented.
There had been a disturbing ring of finality to Isolde’s, “You can’t get away from it,” that seemed almost to slap Sidney in the face. Would they always—at least she and Isolde and Trude, Vick would manage to escape someway—be bound down there in the “quaint” bare house with the Trustees sending their skimpy allowances and long letters of advice and the ladies of the League of Poets coming and going and owning them body and soul? What was to prevent such a fate? They didn’t have money enough to just say—“Dear ladies, take the old house and the desk and the pens and pencils and the old coat—they’re yours—” and run away and do what they pleased; probably a whole dozen of Eggs would not get them anywhere!
“What are you doing mooning there in the window?” cried Vick from the open door. Her arms were filled with a litter of boxes and old portfolios. “Where’s Isolde? I want her to know I dusted things in the study.”
“Isolde’s writing letters. Then she’s going to dye something.”
“On Saturday!”
“Yes. I’m going to receive the League visitors today.”
“You!” Victoria went off into such a peal of laughter that she had to lean against the door frame. “Oh—how funny! What’s ever in the air today.”