God bless our home!’”
Lorraine knew Dan had visited with Thurley, so did the village. She wisely kept her counsel and consented to Dan’s stammering request that she call on Thurley—“after all, it might look queer if she did not.”
So she went, as much of a martyr as she had been when she brought Thurley the blue set for an engagement present. This time she passed into the parlors of the old-fashioned house aglow with their pretty trifles and cut flowers, the grand piano in the center like a precocious and not to be ignored child, and met Thurley in timid, dignified manner, taking count of her Parisian costume, her new mannerisms and accent, her rather flippant opinions of the topics of the day, promising her thumping little heart that when she was alone, in the peace of her own house, she would struggle to regain her poise and contentment of mind which this astonishingly charming yet affected person fairly wrested from her!
In fact Birge’s Corners called on Thurley prepared to ask curious and mortifying questions, only to make a hurried exit in quite a different frame of mind. For with a perfectly cordial manner Thurley met all alike. She had a faculty of making them feel their own selves quite impossible; they were ill at ease before her—nor did they ask her to sing, she forestalled that before the subject of the weather was exhausted. They left saying that “Thurley had a way with her—and Dan could thank his lucky star he had been saved from the marriage.” Thurley repaid no calls—not even to Lorraine, although the latter had asked her from a sense of duty. She lived in her own way at the Fincherie with Miss Clergy nodding approval on whatsoever she did or demanded. In a short time, when she flooded the town with what the village dubbed as lunatics, no one was over-keen to have her call.
The “lunatics” were men with bangs, wearing broad scarlet sashes and going without hats in the sun, sketching under white umbrellas and talking “some queer language”; the women had bobbed their hair and possessed more gowns than brains; they slept away half the morning and danced away half the night while Thurley was the gayest of all the strange company, turning the Fincherie lawn into a stage to have tableaux and folk dances, and all her guests, bobbed-haired or banged or what not, scowled at the natives curiously and commented upon them audibly as if they were insensible of understanding.
Dan Birge was seen driving with Thurley, drinking tea on the Fincherie lawn, being a spectator at the entertainments. Lorraine grew more fragile-looking but kept her own counsel and Owen Pringle failed to secure an autograph or an order for a bonnet, while Josie, Cora and Hazel found no encouragement or interest shown in their dramatic, musical or matrimonial futures!
Presently, the Corners said it would be a blessing if Thurley Precore would choose some other place to spend her summers. Whatever made her pa and ma drive into the town in the first place? She would get her “comeupment” for this smartness, to say nothing of a real white slave dance which she gave, at which she was auctioned off to a big fat man with white hair and a tucked, crêpe de chine shirt, who made his living playing on a little penny whistle! The devil did not have all the good times in the world—neither would Thurley Precore. The older generation had felt from the first it was not boding good luck to have so great a spirit develop suddenly via a partly demented recluse. Here was proof enough! For Thurley and her friends neither went to church nor patronized church social affairs. They lived “like they tell of,” was the report, “just as like to get up at three o’clock in the morning to go on hollerin’ and yellin’ like to wake the dead or else sleep like logs until noon ... and if Miss Clergy thought she had done a smart thing in makin’ so much out of Thurley because Thurley used to be able to carry a tune, she had an awful awakening ahead of her!”
“She’ll never get her married off to no one,” the village further commented, when Thurley in a tight fitting black habit had cantered up and down the streets on a snowy white mare, while a moving picture man from New York patiently lurked along the roadside to catch a few poses. “Dan Birge ought to go down on his knees to thank Lorraine for marryin’ him ... but does he? Oh, no, when he gets down on his knees it’s only to tie up Thurley’s shoe latches! Never mindin’ his business nor his wife’s fadin’—nor the sport they make of him right to his face—he’s a worse fool than they are!”
When the Corners became aware that Thurley’s terrier, Taffy, had several sets of harness and sweaters, they decided it was far more depraved than Dan Birge’s buying a dog and having him ride in the front seat of the car. Following on the heels of this discovery, the terrier had a birthday party with a frosted cake and three candles, and the newspaper editor admitted that they had sent in a paragraph describing the event, fully expecting it would be published. Upon being pressed for the details, the editor said the sum total of the description read,
“Taffy Precore was the proud recipient of many handsome gifts, including a set of white rubbers from Madame Lissa Dagmar and an unusually attractive travelling coat from Collin Hedley. Covers were laid for fourteen and special out-of-town guests were Woofie Airedale, whose guardian is Siri Mantenelli, the opera singer, and Ogre, foster child of Ernestine Christian!”