There were half a dozen village friends of Mrs. Warrener’s whose status was on a higher plane than hers, whose houses had more square feet of land around them, whose “help” was more efficient. In their parlors now and then she took an inadequate hand at euchre, and of late she had been trying to learn bridge. These ladies made the town library and the little hospital, the Children’s Home and the church interests, run more or less smoothly; they had a hundred busy, useful interests. They were good wives and good mothers and good citizens. She had never heard any of them use the verb “to be bored,” and if she had, she would not have known what it meant! She suffered under a complaint which, like many maladies, is less fatal so long as it has no name; but the disease was too acute to be ignored. It had engendered too many complications.
At the town library the librarian from among the rows of school books one day handed down to Mrs. Warrener a French dictionary. From the novel she had read a few days before she had copied out this phrase:
Ennui is like the unseen worm in the wood, that slowly gnaws the good, clean substance until his parasite presence is declared by innumerable interstices that finally destroy the wood and proclaim it rotten to the fiber—ennui had eaten into her, devoured her. There was not one inch of her that did not ache from desuetude, from moral inertia.
Gertrude found the word “ennui” in the dictionary, and the following definition: “Listlessness, languor, tedium, lassitude, tiresomeness,” compared it with her scrap of paper, puzzled her pretty brows until their lines looked like pain. As she put up the book and left the library, she said to herself: “Well, I guess that’s what’s the matter with me.”
CHAPTER V.
When Slocum was scarcely a village Edward McAllister, after his retirement from the Supreme Court, purchased sufficient land in the State to establish a model farm. Here his children, Paul and Agnes, were born, and before they had time to know they were Americans McAllister accepted a foreign embassy and lived with his family abroad until his death. His daughter, Agnes, had married in Rome, and after a few years of wandering and continental life, with her husband, Mr. John Bellamy, and her brother, Mr. Paul McAllister, she returned to Slocum.
They had come back in order that Mrs. Bellamy should see just how much she could stand of American life and manners; in order that their children might have enough of their native soil on their hands as they played, and enough of its education in their heads, to entitle them to the self-sufficiency of American citizens.
Little Bellamy was immured in Groton, hard at the American part of it, and Mrs. Bellamy sat this morning in a charming room furnished in Colonial style: continental taste and the accessories that make living a luxury and pleasure combined to make her a charming environment. Mrs. Bellamy was teaching her little daughter the gentle art of making a long rope of useless wool by means of a spool and a row of pins.
The mother’s head bent close to the little girl’s was as golden as the child’s. Her hands, with their flashing rings, played in and out among the pins with a skill nothing short of miraculous in the eyes of the little girl, who took up the spool between her own tiny fingers, the worsted twisted hard around her thumb.
By the table, in a luxurious leather chair, the other occupant of the room was almost lost to sight. His presence was, however, indicated by the film of cigarette smoke that rose curlingly around his head. The yellow cover of a French novel was just visible above the table.