Other People's Business Part 3

Perhaps Joel's tyrannical rule in the household for the last twenty years had been due in part to his knowing the time to yield, a knowledge that would have prolonged the sway of many a despot. He went up-stairs in a rebellious mood which found expression in invectives against womankind, its blindness, its wilfulness, its weak subservience to usage. But when he appeared at the breakfast table, the conventional shirt and trousers testified to the extent of Persis'

authority.

Little was said during the progress of the meal. Joel, saddened by the lack of enthusiasm with which his great discovery had been received, maintained a dignified silence. Persis, always moved to magnanimity by triumph, forbore to emphasize her victory by obtruding on her brother's reserve. Not till Joel had been fortified by a hearty breakfast and had reached the advertising columns in his perusal of the weekly paper, did she venture to touch upon another delicate theme.

"Joel, I wish you'd open the shutters of your bedroom and run up the shade to the top. If ever a room needed airing and sunning, that's the one. I'm going to give it a good cleaning as soon as I can take the time, but this morning I'm too busy. Annabel Sinclair's coming for a fitting at ten o'clock and that young Mis' Thompson at eleven. And I'm as sure as I can be of anything but death and taxes, that Annabel will be late."

Persis' apprehension would have taken on a keener edge, could she have been favored at that moment with a glimpse of the patron of whose punctuality she was in doubt. Ever since eight o'clock, Diantha Sinclair had been opening the door of her mother's room at intervals of five minutes and closing the same noiselessly, after a brief survey of the figure on the bed. As the tenantry of field and forest apprehend the approach of some natural cataclysm, by means of signs imperceptible to man's grosser senses, so to Diantha the curve of her mother's shoulder under the sheet, presaged a storm. Her uneasiness was due to a horrid uncertainty as to which would anger her mother the more, to be wakened too early or to be allowed to sleep too long.

By nine o'clock, the second of the alternatives seemed to Diantha the more serious. She stole into her mother's room, and stationing herself by the bed, spoke in the softest of voices; "Mama, your new dress--"

The opening showed a tact creditable to her years. After all, it is one thing to be wakened by the crashing of a boarding-house breakfast gong, and another to be roused by the music of a harp. Annabel opened her eyes with a sense of something agreeable on the way, and Diantha promptly acted on her advantage.

"Mama, you are to try on your new dress at ten o'clock, and it's nine already."

"Nine!" moaned Annabel. "You should have called me before." Yet she made no effort to rise and after a moment added sharply: "What are you waiting for? Can't you see I'm awake?"

Diantha scurried like a rabbit, and her mother turned on her pillow for another half-hour, an indulgence she would not have ventured under her daughter's observant eyes. Like many people who defy public opinion in large matters, she was acutely sensitive to criticism over trifles.

Aspersions of her character she accepted philosophically, almost complacently indeed, because of her inward conviction that they were indirectly a tribute paid by jealousy to her superior fascinations.

But a suggestion that a dress was unbecoming would make her unhappy for days.

Her first act on rising was to run up the shade, in order to benefit by the full light of the morning sun. Then for some minutes she studied her reflection in a little hand-mirror which gave back to her view a face rapt and absorbed. With Annabel this rite was a subst.i.tute for morning prayer, and it brought her a peace not always secured by equally sincere devotions. Diantha's willowy height woke in her a sense of exasperated fear. It sometimes seemed to her that the girl's growth was with deliberate purpose, a malicious demonstration of the fact that her mother was not so young as she looked.

The testimony of the hand-mirror was rea.s.suring, clear pink and white, the crisp freshness of apple blossoms. Annabel worshiped and rose from her knees, duly fortified against the mischances of the day, though her divinity had been only her own beauty.

At nineteen, Annabel had married a man twenty years her senior, who like many of his s.e.x a.s.sumed that a pretty wife is from the Lord and a.s.sociated amiability, compliance and other feminine graces with a rose-leaf complexion. The earlier years of their married life had been a succession of ghastly struggles in which both sides had been worsted, descending to incredible brutalities. Sinclair was essentially a gentleman, and long after those contentious years he sometimes woke from his sleep in a cold sweat, remembering what he had said to his wife and she to him. Her unwelcome motherhood had only widened the breach between them. Her hysterically fierce resentment of that which he had innocently a.s.sumed to be a woman's crowning happiness, had extinguished finally the last gleaming embers of a flame which might have been altar fire and hearth fire both in one.

The man's growing apathy at length gave the victory to the woman. If he did not hate his wife, Stanley Sinclair was so far from loving her that his thin lips curled mockingly over the recollection of what he had hoped on his wedding-day. If there is pathos in the lost illusions of youth, those of middle life are grim tragedy. Sinclair wanted peace at any price. The masculine intolerance of rivalry was less insistent than it would have been in a younger man. Out of the wreck of things he asked to save only quiet and the chance to live a gentleman. His wife might go her way, so that she showed him a serene face and treated him with tolerable courtesy. And so tacitly the two made the Great Compromise.

At fifty-seven Stanley Sinclair was a cynically cheerful philosopher.

He had long before discovered that technically his rights as a husband were safe. The woman whose vanity is stronger than her affections is shielded by triple armor, and Annabel's virtue was safe, at least while her complexion lasted. She was a glutton of admiration, and since the highest homage a man could pay her charms was to fall in love with her, she bent her energies unweariedly to bringing him to the point of candid love-making. With success, her interest waned. A lover might last six months or even a year, but as a rule he was displaced in considerably less time by some understudy whom Annabel had thoughtfully kept in training for the star role.

In Annabel's creed, masculine admiration was the supreme good. It was the ultimate test of a woman's success, as the ability to make money tested the success of men. Beauty was precious, because it was the most effective lure. Talent was not to be despised, since it too could boast its captives. But the woman who claimed that she prized her gift for its own sake was guilty of an affectation which could deceive no one, not at least, so shrewd an observer as Annabel.

At nineteen she had married a man more than twice her age. Since then her preference for youthfulness had been growing, a phenomenon not unusual in women of her type. At thirty-seven, she looked upon her husband as senile, patriarchal, as far removed from her generation as the Pilgrim fathers. Men of her own age bored her. They were interested in business, politics, their families, a thousand things besides herself. They had lost the obsession of personality, the you-and-I att.i.tude which is the life-blood of flirtation.

Just now Annabel preferred boys still young enough to be secretly proud of the necessity of shaving every other day, young enough to swagger a little when they lighted a cigarette. At her present rate of progress, by the time she was fifty, she would have come by successive gradations to the level of short trousers and turn-over collars.

The average worshiper may hurry over his prayers, but the devotee of vanity must not make haste with her toilet. It was quarter of eleven when Annabel was dressed, but since the results were satisfactory, she was untroubled over her lack of punctuality. It was Diantha who fidgeted, and looked at the clock.

"You're 'most an hour behind time. You'd better hurry if you don't want Miss Persis to scold."

"I shan't hurry for any one," Annabel returned, selecting after due deliberation the parasol with the pink lining. Her husband was lounging on the porch as she went out, and he greeted her with his usual, "Good morning, my dear," his gaze following her with the gently satiric smile which always made her feverishly impatient to consult the little mirror she carried in her hand-bag. That smile hinted at extraordinary insight and unnerved her as his frenzied outbursts of anger had never done. She had lost her power to hurt him except in the way of humiliation, but he cynically argued that the constant amus.e.m.e.nt she afforded him almost paid this last indebtedness. It was like having a season ticket to a theater.

Persis Dale was fitting young Mrs. Thompson, the traveling man's wife, when Annabel made her appearance. She nodded, glad that the half dozen pins held loosely between her lips, relieved her from the obligation of a welcoming smile.

"Maybe you'd like to set on the porch, Mis' Sinclair, till I'm at liberty. Your hour was ten, you know. It's shady out there and you can look over the new books. And now, Mis' Thompson, before I go any further we've got to decide whether it's to open in the front or in the back."

"I think the b.u.t.tons down the back are more stylish," said young Mrs.

Thompson.

"There's no doubt of that," Persis agreed. "Everything in the book is back. But there's always more'n one way to skin a cat. I could put a row of hooks under the lace, around this side of the yoke, and n.o.body'd ever know where it was fastened, or whether you were just run into it."

Young Mrs. Thompson hesitated, studying herself in the mirror. Persis employed several pins in tightening a seam and expressed her views at some length.

"It's just this way, Mis' Thompson. If you had a nice little girl, big enough to stand on a chair and fasten you up the back, I wouldn't say a word against it. But of all things that rack your nerves and spoil your temper, twisting and squirming and trying to reach three or four b.u.t.tons, first from above and then from below, is certainly the limit.

And putting a shawl over your shoulders on a hot day and going to find some neighbor to do it for you, ain't a great deal better."

"But this is going to be my Sunday dress," said the six-months bride, whose color had increased appreciably during the course of Persis'

remarks. "And Will is always home for Sunday."

"Well, if you feel like taking the risk, Mis' Thompson, I haven't a word to say. But when a man's home for a Sunday rest, he generally wants a rest, and dresses that b.u.t.ton up the back don't seem to fit in with the idea. Human nature can't stand only just so much and man nature considerable less."

An undecided murmur escaped the lips of young Mrs. Thompson.

"I had a customer," continued Persis, recklessly filling her mouth with pins, "who gave up a good position as cashier in a city glove store, to keep house for her brother when his wife died. She was always telling me how grateful he was. Seemed like he couldn't do enough for her.

She used to say it 'most made her uncomfortable to see that man racking his brains to find some way of showing her how he appreciated what she'd done for him. Please walk to the end of the room, Mis' Thompson, slow and graceful, till I see how that skirt hangs. Just a trifle long on the seam. I thought so.

"Well, I made her a princess dress; gray it was and very stylish. It hooked down the back, and then there was a drapery effect that hooked up the side and across the shoulder. I wouldn't dare say how many cards of hooks and eyes I used on that dress. I did ask her once how she'd get into it, and she said that her brother, what with having been married and all, was as handy as a woman at such things.

"I sent it home of a Sat.u.r.day, and I didn't see her for two weeks.

Then she brought it in and she was crying. She wanted me to fix it some way so that she could get into it by herself. Easier said than done, you can believe. She'd worn it twice, and both times they'd had words, and some of 'em were swear words, too. Well, I did the best I could by the dress, but it was too late to save the day. You see she'd taken such comfort in thinking how grateful he was, that she hadn't minded what she'd given up herself, but after that, things was different. She went back to the city in less than a year. I think she's a cashier in some restaurant. She couldn't get her old place in the glove store."

Young Mrs. Thompson had a bright idea. "Couldn't you put a row of b.u.t.tons down the back, just for looks, and then hook it under the lace, same as you said?"

"Easiest thing in the world," Persis a.s.sured her. The domestic peace of the Thompson family was preserved for the time being, though neither woman guessed for how brief a period.

Annabel Sinclair was thoroughly out of temper when the time for her fitting came, though she paid Persis the compliment of making a whole-hearted effort to conceal her feelings. Persis Dale was one of the few of whom Annabel stood in awe. Behind her back she frequently referred to the dressmaker as an "interfering old maid," but in Persis'

presence she paid reluctant tribute to the dominating personality. When very angry, Annabel indulged in whatever brutalities of plain speech were suggested by a somewhat limited imagination, but her habitual weapon was innuendo. She shrank from Persis' bluntness as a dog cringes away from a whip.

When young Mrs. Thompson had hurried off to the brand-new cottage on the hill, Annabel concealed her annoyance under a smile, inquired after Joel's health and yielded to Persis' opinion with flattering deference.

But Persis' mood was not merciful.

"How your Diantha is growing, Mis' Sinclair. She must have left you way behind before this."

Annabel winced. She had long been in the habit of referring to Diantha as "my little girl." Of late she had fancied that her listeners looked amused at her choice of a qualifying adjective.

"It's such a pity," she answered in her softest voice, "for a child to grow that way. People expect so much more of tall children."

"Well, girls often get their growth by the time they're Diantha's age.

Let's see. She must be six--"

"I believe that seam twists," Annabel exclaimed. She chose her criticism at random with the sole purpose of distracting Persis'

attention before the obnoxious word should be spoken. Yet it was true that she had been married eighteen years. In another seven she would be able to celebrate her silver wedding, an anniversary she had always a.s.sociated with old age. The horror of the situation was not lessened by its grotesqueness.

"The worst of it is that everybody in this dreadful little town knows all about it," she thought with a sense of panic. "People haven't anything to do but remember dates." She wondered if she could prevail upon her husband to go west, leaving Diantha in school somewhere. Then she could say what she chose of her "little girl" without appealing to the risibilities of her audience.

Persis, distracted for a moment by the false alarm of a twisting seam, soon returned to her guns. With a skill Annabel was forced to admire, she veiled her cruelty in compliment.

"Diantha is a pretty girl. Pretty and clever with her tongue. An apple's got to have flavor as well as a rosy skin. There'll be lively times at your place before long. It'll make you and Mr. Sinclair feel young again to have courting going on in the house."