At the Age of Eve

by Kate Trimble Sharber

Now if there is one thing a girl hates worse than having her rat show in the presence of her beloved it is to have that beloved's name appear in a society column when her own is not in the same line!

"Why the Blakes?" I kept wondering uneasily, as I read over the hateful paragraph again and again; and I tried to fight down the fierce feeling of jealousy which took possession of me. "Why couldn't he have gone to the foot-ball game with some one else—or why couldn't he have come home?"

I found upon this occasion that jealousy is a passion which makes me physically ill, and I thought quickly of how tormented Richard must be by his jealous disposition. I wondered if he had ever felt the quick desire to strangle Alfred Morgan that I now caught myself feeling to annihilate the entire Blake faction. They had no right to make Richard leave home upon such an occasion as this; or they should have finished their hateful business and sent him on back home for Thanksgiving. They certainly had no right to take him off with them to a foot-ball game for all the world to see—and have his name with theirs in the paper next morning.

"Major Blake had with him in his car, besides Mrs. Blake, Miss Berenice Blake, who returned last week from Denver, and Mr. Richard Chalmers."

I knew the horrid words by heart, yet I read them over and over. And even this was not the worst. On the front page of the Times was a cartoon representing Major Blake seated beside a little creek, angling persistently for a fish in midstream—a fish with Richard's handsome head and "Chalmers" printed in big letters across the side. The bait was a bag of gold and a handful of glory; and beneath it was written "Little fishie in the brook, can daddy catch him with a hook?"

Such a cartoon in Rufe's paper struck me as being pregnant with meaning. What did it portend? Why did Richard leave home at this time to spend Thanksgiving with old man Blake if it did not mean that he was entangled with him? How deeply entangled—and for what? Major Blake had some time ago given the anti-liquor forces to understand that they had not money enough for their campaign to make a union with them interesting to him. But the Appleton followers had been equally unsuccessful in trying to gain his support. Could it be that he and Richard intended forming a separate faction where his own personal popularity should cut a tremendous figure in gaining for him what he wanted, and he could have the backing of Richard's friends among the temperance forces? But where would Richard come in then? Why should old man Blake give all the biggest portion of the plum to Richard, when he had never been governor himself?

I thought over the matter and thought—until I grew dizzy with the problem, yet I never found anything that could serve even as a half-way solution. But enough of my own grievances.

As I have said, Sophie and Evelyn are both miserable, too, though in entirely different ways. Evelyn is half ill, with a constantly threatening pain in her right side—a trouble which she has had for several years—and Sophie, poor girl, has stayed in her room most of the time because she is so disappointed in the way Mr. Maxwell has acted since he learned that she is a working-woman. Horrid cad! He has watched Sophie every minute she has been in his presence since that night, looking as if he were a detective and suspected her of carrying concealed weapons about her. Yet all the time there is a look of dumb misery in his eyes—sorrow and incredulity.

He has several times tried to get me off alone where he could talk to me of the occurrence Thanksgiving night, but I have been careful to avoid him, for I am as much disappointed in him as Sophie is. Each of them has tried to leave, but Mrs. Chalmers has insisted upon their not doing so. She is so upset over Evelyn that she needs Sophie's skilled advice in nursing, although no open acknowledgment of the matter has been made. And she has insisted that Mr. Maxwell remain at least until Richard returns.

Meanwhile she has tried to get a message through to Richard in the city, but she has been so far unable to find him. Altogether it is rather a miserable household.