“This is the prettiest home I ever was in in my life, and there is not a lace curtain in the house!”
We laughed—everybody laughs at Sallie—and Rachel said gently,
“We don’t need them.”
Sallie looked up quickly and took in the full significance of the words, as she answered in the same tone,
“No, you do not, but I do.” And each woman had told her heart history. Now, Rachel must know almost as much about Sallie as I do; but she never will know all.
Sallie said she went home and hated every room in her house separately and specifically; then she had a good cry over “the perfectness of the Percivals,” and issued invitations to a masked ball.
“That ball was full of significance, Ruth,” she told me afterwards with her most whimsically knowing look. “It was bristling with it. But nobody thought of it except a certain little goose I know named Sara Cox Osborne.”
Jack Whitehouse and Pet Winterbotham are married. They had the most beautiful wedding I ever saw; but it was like watching the babes in the wood, for they are such a young-looking pair.
I understand better now what Pet meant when she talked about Jack’s appearance so much. I think he expressed to her the idea of perpetual youth and eternal spring-time. To me, too, it seems as if he ought always to be yachting in blue and white, or lying at full length on the grass at some girl’s feet. And Pet herself makes an admirable companion-piece. When I see her in a misty white ball-dress, with one man bringing her an ice and another holding her flowers and a third bearing her filmy wraps, I feel that things are quite as they should be. Some people seem to be born for fair weather and smooth sailing.
It is too soon to judge them finally. Norris Whitehouse’s nephew will outgrow the ball-room, and Pet will find in Louise an incentive to grow womanly.