E-text prepared by Mary Meehan and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team. Produced from pageimages provided by the Million Book Project.
Author of "Come Out of the Kitchen," "Ladies Must Live," "Wings in the
Nights," etc.
1918
"… and then he added in a less satisfied tone: "But friendship is souncertain. You don't make any announcement to your friends or vows toeach other, unless you're at an age when you cut your initials in thebark of a tree. That's what I'd like to do."
Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. The stage of hercoming adventure was beautifully set—the conventional stage for theadventure of a young girl, her mother's drawing-room. Her mother had theart of setting stages. The room was not large,—a New York brownstonefront in the upper Sixties even though altered as to entrance, andallowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally intended for itsuse, is not a palace,—but it was a room and not a corridor; you had thecomfortable sense of four walls about you when its one small door wasonce shut. It was filled, perhaps a little too much filled, with objectswhich seemed to have nothing in common except beauty; but propinquity,propinquity of older date than the house in which they now were, hadgiven them harmony. Nothing in the room was modern except some uncommonlycomfortable sofas and chairs, and the pink and yellow roses that stoodabout in Chinese bowls.
Miss Severance herself was hardly aware of the charm of the room. On thethird floor she had her own room, which she liked much better. There wasa great deal of bright chintz in it, and maple furniture of a latecolonial date, inherited from her mother's family, the Lanleys, anddiscarded by her mother, who described the taste of that time as "pure,but provincial." Crystal and ivories and carved wood and Italianembroideries did not please Miss Severance half so well as the austerelines of those work-tables and high-boys.
It was after five, almost half-past, and he had said "about five." MissSeverance, impatient to begin the delicious experience of anticipation,had allowed herself to be ready at a quarter before the hour. Not thatshe had been entirely without some form of anticipation since she wokeup; not, perhaps, since she had parted from him under the windy awningthe night before. They had held up a long line of restless motors as shestood huddled in her fur-trimmed cloak, and he stamped and jigged tokeep warm, bareheaded, in his thin pumps and shining shirt-front, withhis shoulders drawn up and his hands in his pockets, while they almostawkwardly arranged this meeting for the next day.
Several times during the preceding evening she had thought he was goingto say something of the kind, for they had danced together a great deal;but they had always danced in silence. At the time, with his arm abouther, silence had seemed enough; but in separation there is somethingwonderfully solid and comforting in the memory of a spoken word; it islike a coin in the pocket. And after Miss Severance had bidden him goodnight at the long glass door of the paneled ball-room without his sayinganything of a future meeting, she had gone up-stairs with a heavy heartto find her maid and her wrap. She knew as soon as she reached thedressing-room that she h