Clinton Dangerfield.
THE WARRENERS
By MARIE VAN VORST
CHAPTER I.
GERTRUDE Warrener was twenty-five years old on the day she went into the back library and, seated in a rocking chair, a newspaper and a box of candy-kitchen chocolates in her lap—began to live.
Hitherto the boundaries of her lifeline had been limited by a wooden fence circling a few feet of coarse grass and two frame houses like her own. To the rear, in the yard, four poles formed a square with peculiar precision, and on washdays the level lines of a cord, stretching cat’s-cradle-wise, supported the household laundry.
She had taken for eight years the front rooms of the house for her point of vantage, and when she had mentally stated “Mrs. Felter’s just gone into the Perches’,” or “Pearl Exeter does her marketing in the afternoons instead of the mornings,” she had nothing further to say. One day she caught herself in the middle of some such banal reflection, and, going to the back of the house, took her place in the window of a microscopic library.