“How are you busy? At home?”
She let her mother answer that.
“Freda graduated from the Normal last year. We hoped there would be a teaching opening here for her but as there wasn’t, we persuaded her to stay home with us and take a little special work at the Normal.”
Helen kept her eyes on the girl’s face. Keenly sensitive to beauty as she was, she had felt that it was the girl rather than the mother who created the atmosphere of this house with which she felt in sympathy. She wanted to talk to her. As the meal progressed she kept her talking, drew her out little by little, and confidence began to come back to Freda’s face and frankness to her tongue.
“She’s beautiful,” thought Helen, “such a stunning creature.”
But it was later that she got the key to Freda.
They were in the living room and she picked up some of the books on the table. They interested her. It was a kind of reading which showed some taste and contemporary interest. There was the last thin little gray-brown “Poetry,” there was “The Tree of Heaven,” “Miss Lulu Bett,” Louis Untermeyer’s poems. Those must be Freda’s. There was also what you might expect of Mrs. Thorstad. Side by side lay the “Education of Henry Adams” and “The Economic Consequences of the Peace.”
“Of course the mother reads those,” thought Helen, “after she’s sure they’re so much discussed that they’re not dangerous any longer. But the mother never reads ‘Poetry.’”
“Your daughter likes poetry?” she asked Mrs. Thorstad.
“She reads a great deal of it. I wish I could make her like more solid things. But of course she’s young.”