XIV
Against the car the wind hurled the challenge of a thousand angry spears of rain. With blow after blow they assailed the leather hood, only to break and fall helplessly to the streaming road.
"What a night for a dance," groaned Mrs. Hammond. "If I had known what it was going to be like, I really shouldn't have come, though I hate to disappoint you."
But even if she had known, she must still have come, and not only because she hated to disappoint the girls. For matters at Miller's Rise were growing desperate. Morning after morning Mrs. Hammond had come downstairs to find her daughters confronting her like the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual failure, Connie always bored and restless, Muriel becoming yearly more prim and silent. It was 1914 already, and nothing done. Adelaide Waring's husband at York earned £2,000 a year. Nancy Cartwright was now Nancy Buchanan, and even Daisy Parker, as Daisy Weathergay, lived in a little corner house along the Avenue, and kept a nice little maid, and paid calls, and shopped down the village street with one of those painted wicker baskets on her arm.
Of course there was Dr. McKissack. Surely, surely he must mean something. If only one were more certain of Connie. If only that queer, reckless strain in her nature would not make her do unconventional things that men disliked. She was so like Arthur, and yet in a woman, somehow, it did not do to be like Arthur. In the darkness of the car, Mrs. Hammond's face grew weary, thinking of bitter things. Her troubles were not confined to the spinsterhood of her daughters.
The car lurched and jolted round a corner into the mean street that crouched before the Kingsport thoroughfares.
"Muriel, I do wish that you would not tread on my shoe," complained Connie. "You know that they're my best ones. It isn't as if I could get a new pair any day."
"I'm sorry. I didn't see."
"No. You never do see. Mother, why can't we have an allowance? I'm sick of this beastly dependence upon Father. It's all to gratify his vanity. He'll take us in to Kingsport to buy a rotten hat, like when he bought my velour before Christmas, and I was simply pining for new furs. It's just to hear us say thank you, and to feel how generous he is."