CHAPTER IV
BEAUTY WAITS
Edith Towne had lived with her Uncle Frederick nearly four years when she became engaged to Delafield Simms. Her mother was dead, as was her father. Frederick was her father’s only brother, and had a big house to himself, after his mother’s death. It seemed the only haven for his niece, so he asked her, and asked also his father’s cousin, Annabel Towne, to keep house for him, and chaperone Edith.
Annabel was over sixty, and rather indefinite, but she served to play propriety, and there was nothing else demanded of her in Frederick’s household of six servants. She was a dried-up and desiccated person, with fixed ideas of what one owed to society. Frederick’s mother had been like that, so he did not mind. He rather liked to think that the woman of his family kept to old ideals. It gave to things an air of dignity.
Edith, when she came, was different. So different that Frederick was glad that she had three more years at college before she would spend the winters with him. The summers were not hard to arrange. Edith and Annabel adjourned to the Towne cottage on an island in Maine—and Frederick went up for week-ends and for the month of August. Edith spent much time out-of-doors with her young friends. She was rather fond of her Uncle Fred, but he did not loom large on the horizon of her youthful occupations.
Then came her winter at home, and her consequent engagement to Delafield Simms. It was because of Uncle Fred that she became engaged. She simply didn’t want to live with him any more. She felt that Uncle Fred would be glad to have her go, and the feeling was mutual. She was an elephant on his hands. Naturally. He was a great old dear, but he was a Turk. He didn’t know it, of course. But his ideas of being master of his own house were perfectly archaic. Cousin Annabel and the servants, and everybody in his office simply hung on his words, and Edith wouldn’t hang. She came into his bachelor Paradise like a rather troublesome Eve, and demanded her share of the universe. He didn’t like it, and there you were.
It was really Uncle Fred who wanted her to marry Delafield Simms. He talked about it a lot. At first Edith wouldn’t listen. But Delafield was persistent and patient. He came gradually to be as much of a part of her everyday life as the meals she ate or the car she drove. Uncle Fred was always inviting him. He was forever on hand, and when he wasn’t she missed him.
They felt for each other, she decided, the thing called “love.” It was not, perhaps, the romance which one found in books. But she had been taught carefully at college to distrust romance. The emphasis had been laid on the transient quality of adolescent emotion. One married for the sake of the race, and one chose, quite logically, with one’s head instead, as in the old days, with the heart.
So there you had it. Delafield was eligible. He was healthy, had brains enough, an acceptable code of morals—and was willing to let her have her own way. If there were moments when Edith wondered if this program was adequate to wedded bliss, she put the thought aside. She and Delafield liked each other no end. Why worry?
And really at times Uncle Fred was impossible. His mother had lived until he was thirty-five, she had adored him, and had passed on to Cousin Annabel and to the old servants in the house the formula by which she had made her son happy. Her one fear had been that he might marry. He was extremely popular, much sought after. But he had kept his heart at home. His sweetheart, he had often said, was silver-haired and over sixty. He basked in her approbation; was soothed and sustained by it.