"I don't see how I can!" objected Mabel. "I told Rosanna I would come and I reckon I had better go. You can go some other time, can't you, mamma?"
"I suppose I can," said Mrs. Brewster, and left the room.
Mabel glanced at her brother and noting his scowl, commenced to read a magazine.
She was perfectly miserable. When it came time to dress, she donned her old frock, wondering why her mother had laid the new one, still unfinished, across her bed. Mabel loved to go to the Hortons. But for once the dinner was not a success. All the conversation seemed to hinge on anecdotes of unselfishness and generosity. Mabel thought of Frank working on his gym suit because she wouldn't mend it for him, but she thought most of her mother giving up her dinner to sit at home and wait for the laundress. Her mother was too kind to make the poor colored woman come again for her money. Mrs. Brewster knew that she needed it.
Mabel, sitting with unwonted primness and silence at the Horton table, thought harder and harder and could not enjoy herself. And Mrs. Horton, the little Scout Captain, saw and smiled to herself a sly, quiet smile that scarcely disturbed her dimples. She wondered curiously what sort of a report Mabel would bring her.
CHAPTER III
We will leave Mabel embarked on her desperate career of utter selfishness and return to Claire Maslin.
When Rosanna and Helen and pretty Elise went to call on her they found her rooms had been marvelously changed from the stiff appearance of hotel suites by the gorgeous draperies and scarfs and table covers placed wherever they could possibly be put. A faint, sweet, oriental odor seemed to come from them, and the soft-stepping Chinaman who ushered them in seemed to be part of a dream. Claire looked modern enough, however, in her kilted skirt of big green plaid, soft silk shirtwaist and dull green sweater. Her face was as impassive as ever, but she seemed to think that as hostess something more than silence was required of her, and she talked in a very friendly and entertaining manner.
Elise, always thoughtful of little courtesies, asked almost at once if they might meet Madame, her mother, and the girls were filled with pity when Claire replied that her mother was an invalid and was away at a sanitarium. It was clear that Claire in her silent, repressed way felt her mother's illness very deeply. She changed the subject at once. Little by little, however, the girls gleaned the bare facts of her life. She had been born in the Philippines, and had traveled from post to post and from country to country with her parents until the time of her mother's illness. There was a gap in her story there, but later she went with her father, the Colonel. Her own maid, who took charge of the house when they had one, was a serious looking New England woman about sixty years old. The Chinaman too went with them everywhere.