“I'm not at all sure that Victoria is going to squander it,” was Mrs. Pomfret's comforting remark. “She is too much of a personage, and she has great wealth behind her. I wish Alice were more like her, in some ways. Alice is so helpless, she has to be prodded and prompted continually. I can't leave her for a moment. And when she is married, I'm going into a sanatorium for six months.”
“I hear,” said Mrs. Flint, “that Humphrey Crewe is quite epris.”
“Poor dear Humphrey!” exclaimed Mrs. Pomfret, “he can think of nothing else but politics.”
But we are not to take up again, as yet, the deeds of the crafty Ulysses. In order to relate an important conversation between Mrs. Pomfret and the Rose of Sharon, we have gone back a week in this history, and have left Victoria—absorbed in her thoughts—driving over a wood road of many puddles that led to the Four Corners, near Avalon. The road climbed the song-laden valley of a brook, redolent now with scents of which the rain had robbed the fern, but at length Victoria reached an upland where the young corn was springing from the black furrows that followed the contours of the hillsides, where the big-eyed cattle lay under the heavy maples and oaks or gazed at her across the fences.
Victoria drew up in front of an unpainted farm-house straggling beside the road, a farm-house which began with the dignity of fluted pilasters and ended in a tumble-down open shed filled with a rusty sleigh and a hundred nondescript articles—some of which seemed to be moving. Intently studying this phenomenon from her runabout, she finally discovered that the moving objects were children; one of whom, a little girl, came out and stared at her.
“How do you do, Mary?” said Victoria. “Isn't your name Mary?”
The child nodded.
“I remember you,” she said; “you're the rich lady, mother met at the party, that got father a job.”
Victoria smiled. And such was the potency of the smile that the child joined in it.
“Where's brother?” asked Victoria. “He must be quite grown up since we gave him lemonade.”