When twenty-five years of life had deepened the smooth pink of Elvira’s cheek and amplified the lissome curves of her figure, her next younger sister, Hazel, a girl of twenty-two, had asked her to sit in the drawing room and play propriety on the evenings when the younger sister received callers, and she had done so.
When the matrimonial destiny of Hazel was fulfilled, Marion was coming forward to be chaperoned; then Rosamond; and now—thorniest bud on the Lawrence family tree—Eulalie was fully blown, and quite alive to the beguilements of dress and the desirability of beaux.
Eulalie’s exactions were upsetting to the tranquil mind. Eulalie wanted—not possession of the earth, but to be the earth, and to be duly revolved around by friends, relatives and countless planetary lovers. Elvira’s days grew turbid and her nights devoid of repose.
There had been no comforting maternal support to nestle against since the birth of the youngest Lawrence flower, and the paternal bush towered out of reach in an aloof atmosphere of bonds and rentals and dividends. One old-fashioned point of view he enforced upon his children’s vision: the elder daughter must supervise and chaperon the younger ones to the last jot, and it must be done without disturbance of the business atmosphere.
So Elvira warred with her daily briers alone. Reproach and appeal alike spattered off Eulalie’s buoyant nature as a water sprinkler’s steadiest shower rolls in globules from the crisp, unmoistened leaves of the nasturtium.
“Spinsters are so fussy,” she deplored, comfortably. “Just because they have no beaux themselves, they can’t bear to see a girl have a caller now and then.”
“My dear, keep up a slight acquaintance with truth,” besought Elvira; “a caller now and then would give me a chance to mend my stockings and to get to bed by nine o’clock a few nights in the week. As it is, I have to idle my time away evening after evening, sitting and grinning at your flocks and herds of young men until I am so sleepy I have to go and coax pa to drop a big slipper on the floor overhead, to indicate that it’s bedtime. Hazel and Marion and Rosamond encouraged only a moderate number of beaux, and them only until they naturally paired off with the right ones and could scat the rest off. But you hang on to them all. There is hardly an evening you don’t have from one to five on hand, though you surely can’t want them.”
Eulalie giggled joyously.
“I do want them—every tinker of them. Poor old girl, you never knew the fun of keeping a lot of men in a continual squirm. However, I think possibly what you call the ‘right one’ is bobbing up.”
“Most fervently do I hope so,” sighed Elvira.