“I hope you won’t be sorry, Miss Adair,” she said, without any indication that she considered the hope well-founded. “Personally, I think no one could find a better place than the city we live in, but maybe Beaconhite ain’t so bad. You’ve been a good lodger; always pleasant; prompt with your payments; reg’lar in hours, and you never abused the light priv’lege with an iron, or any such. I’m sorry to lose you; I can truthf’ly say that much, and I wish you well, wherever it may be.”
“Thanks, Miss Spencer. We’ve got on fine, take it as a whole, and I hope the next one in my room may be taken wholier—holier might easily mean two things!” laughed Cis. “Good-bye, good luck! Look after the cat; I like that cat, and she’ll miss my petting. Animals need more than mere food. Good-bye!”
“Now I’m launched!” thought Cis, going off down the street, having shut the front door for the last time with her customary vigorous slam. “No, I’m not! Supper at Dowlings’ and the night there first, then I’ll really be launched! I like Nan heaps, but her mother is quite advice-full!”
Mrs. Dowling was not perfectly sure about Cis, as Cis was sharp enough to perceive. She did not like her indifferent brand of Catholicity, but aside from that, she found nothing to condemn in the girl, or had not so far. “So far” summed up Mrs. Dowling’s attitude toward Cicely; when Nan told her mother that she knew no other girl so intrinsically upright and pure-minded, Mrs. Dowling always said: “I hope she is!” and Nan was helpless to defend Cis against a charitable hope, however dubiously expressed.
Cis was too attractive to men to be wholly trustworthy, Mrs. Dowling felt, with the bias of the rather dull woman who has married the one man who ever noticed her. She could not understand the vivacity that drew others, combined with the nature that allowed no one to pass within definite barriers.
Then young Tom Dowling, only a year and a half Cicely’s junior, found her far too charming; it was bad enough that Nan was her humble adorer, but Tom was another matter. Mrs. Dowling was one of the many women who mistake jealousy for love of their children. Down in the bottom of her heart, Mrs. Dowling felt sure that the act of Providence which removed Cicely Adair from her present field was easily understood, corroborative of her secret misgivings.
Nan and Cicely were bedfellows that last night; like true girls they talked far into it of their views, their hopes, Cicely’s adventure, of Jeanette Lucas and the risks and promises of marriage.
Cis declared that she did not want to marry, nor ever would marry unless there came into her life a man who so filled it that she would be maimed and crippled, lacking him. That man, she added, she did not believe existed. Cis felt self-sufficient, rejoicing in her ability to take care of herself.
Nan, on the other hand, did not mind acknowledging that she thought that she could be quite fond enough of a man to marry him and be happy with him without a cataclysmic passion; he must be good, she added, like a wise little second Eve, because, chiefly, she hoped that she would have many children and she would want their father to be an example to them.
Cis laughed aloud at this, and Nan smothered the laugh in the bedclothes, fearing to disturb her mother at one o’clock.