“Don’t bother about your things now, Grace. Your father’s in the sitting room and Ethel’s up in the spare room sewing. Have you had your supper? There’s some cold baked chicken in the ice-box and I can make you some hot tea.”
“Oh, I had supper before I left, mother.”
Mrs. Durland lifted her head and called her older daughter’s name and from some remote place Ethel answered. Mrs. Durland was as dark as Grace, but cast in a larger mold, and while there were points of resemblance in their faces there was a masculine vigor in the mother that the girl lacked. Mrs. Durland’s iron-gray hair was brushed back smoothly from her low broad forehead. She wore an authoritative air, suggesting at once managerial capacity; a woman, one would say, strongly independent in her thinking; self-assertive and obstinate, but of kind and generous impulses.
Grace was already in the sitting room, where she tip-toed up behind her father, who was absorbed in a book that he read as it lay on the table before him. His bent shoulders suggested that this was his habitual manner of managing a book. Grace passed her hands over his thick shock of disordered hair and patted his cheek; then bent and laid her face against his.
“Well, here I am, daddy!”
“Not home, Grace!” he exclaimed looking up at her bewilderedly. “They didn’t tell me you were coming.”
“I’m a surprise! Nobody knew I was coming tonight!”
“Well, well; I didn’t know there was a train at this hour. It’s nice to see you, Grace.”
He turned to the open volume with an absent confused air, as though uncertain whether anything further was expected of him, then pushed his chair back from the table. Mrs. Durland had come in, followed quickly by Ethel carrying a work-basket and a blouse that she had been at work on when interrupted by the announcement of her sister’s arrival.
Ethel was twenty-seven, an indefinite blonde, and not so tall as Grace. Her mother said that she was a Durland, specifically like one of her husband’s sisters in Ohio, a person for whom Mrs. Durland had never evinced any great liking. Mrs. Durland was a Morley and the Morleys were a different stock, with the Kentucky background so precious in the eyes of many Indianians. Mrs. Durland’s father had been a lawyer of small attainments in a southern Indiana county, but it was in her grandfather Josiah B. Morley, who sat in the Constitutional Convention of 1851, and was later a speaker of the Indiana house of representatives, that her pride concentrated. She had married Durland in Rangerton, where as a young man he had begun with Isaac Cummings the manufacture of a few mechanical specialties, removing shortly to Indianapolis with a number of Durland’s inventions and Cummings’s small capital as the foundation of their fortune.