“Some time when I’m a lot bigger and better and more controlled and not so cheap, I want to talk with you, Grace,” she said; “I know you’re right in lots of things but the addition of your ideas is wrong. The grand total of your philosophy is wrong. It’s got to be wrong. I won’t have it right. But we do need to learn to stop feeling.”
Grace’s look followed her with a queer yearning in it—her eyes seemed to say that she had not finished all she wanted to say.
Horatia went out to the street. The incoherent conversation had checked her desire to see Langley. It had given her a cue. She would stop feeling. Instead of to The Journal office she went to a large shop and tried on hats before a many-sided mirror and was surprised to find herself succeeding in her deliberate mental effort to get her mind away from its pain. The hats interested her. Each one appeared to change her character and she began to speculate on how she would like to change her type during the summer with Maud and the Clapps and Wentworths. The saleswoman brought her the kind of hats she usually ordered—large sailors—plain wing-trimmed shapes, but Horatia laid them aside.
“That is the girl I am escaping from,” she said to herself, removing a straight-brimmed gray sailor, and she pointed to one on a model. It was of plain soft yellow chiffon and drooped a little about her face. Under it she looked provocative, as if deliberately intending to charm.
She had never tried on such a hat before and she lingered before her image in the mirror while the saleswoman poured out tributes.
“I’ll take it,” she said, and proceeded with unparalleled extravagance to choose two more, one of black with soft waving feathers and one of rose felt that crushed itself into different shapes on her head. Then, urged by the saleswoman, who was gathering momentum, she bought a rose sweater to wear with the rose hat, drew a check that half appalled and half amused her and went home to Maud. Maud, receiving three hat boxes next morning, was amazed and delighted. Evidently Horatia intended to play the game. She pressed a yellow frock on Horatia which she insisted was necessary to the well being of the yellow hat and mourned because she herself could not wear yellow. Horatia was very gay. She pirouetted in her hats before Harvey and to her amazement found that she was shaking off her worries and her unhappiness. She wanted to go to the country place and be still more happy. She insisted that unless they made it decently gay there she wasn’t going to stay. And while Harvey chuckled and Maud opened her eyes she danced upstairs to her room, closed the door, flung the yellow hat in the corner and wept into Maud’s Madeira counterpane, suddenly intolerably homesick for nothing in the world so much as her typewriter in The Journal office, the twinkle of the lake under her window and the sound of Jim’s voice in the next room, giving orders, telephoning, dictating.
CHAPTER XVIII
ANTHONY’S sister stood in her cool country living room, arranging her flowers. There were a mass of them that she had brought in from the rough-and-tumble garden by the cottage wall—hollyhocks, tall and pink and already in their place in a green vase against the wall—cerise cinnamon phlox, filling the air with their vivid fragrance, a riot of nasturtiums of all colors, sweet peas whose pastel lavenders and pinks were spoiled until Marjorie put them in a glass basket before a little mirror, poppies, and deep orange African marigolds. Marjorie separated them from each other and then reassembled them, mixing in now bachelors’ buttons with marigolds, and baby’s breath with poppies. She was quite absorbed and her brother, lying on a cushion-piled settle, watched her admiringly and for a few moments silently. When he spoke he seemed to be taking up an interrupted conversation.
“You’re sure she is coming then?”
“Mrs. Williams told me so in town yesterday.”