“In opera those tenors make love as if you were their own,” he said savagely. “I hated to see it!”
“But you were on your wedding journey,” she reminded.
They both laughed, jangling, noncontagious sounds.
“But, Dan, we’d never have gotten along,” she reminded him. “I’m a creature of whims and moods—spoiled, of course, it was inevitable.” She began telling some of her experiences.
“But you won’t forbid my being just pal,” he urged, as she consulted the anklet watch and found it tea-time.
“Not if you’re content to have it that way,” she promised. “Run along and I’ll follow, it would never do to have us drive off in unison.”
As she stood up her rumpled lace draperies made her seem more like a little girl.
“Thurley, Thurley,” he said in sort of impassioned reverie, “you have come back to me—”
“Only for the summer,” she answered in gay decision. “Oh, Dan, remember I haven’t really found myself, nor shall I, perhaps. So think of me as lightly as you can. My present state of mind would permit of but one motto for over my fireplace,
‘Forty miles from wood, Forty miles from water, Forty miles from hell— God bless our home!’”
Lorraine knew Dan had visited with Thurley, so did the village. She wisely kept her counsel and consented to Dan’s stammering request that she call on Thurley—“after all, it might look queer if she did not.”
So she went, as much of a martyr as she had been when she brought Thurley the blue set for an engagement present. This time she passed into the parlors of the old-fashioned house aglow with their pretty trifles and cut flowers, the grand piano in the center like a precocious and not to be ignored child, and met Thurley in timid, dignified manner, taking count of her Parisian costume, her new mannerisms and accent, her rather flippant opinions of the topics of the day, promising her thumping little heart that when she was alone, in the peace of her own house, she would struggle to regain her poise and contentment of mind which this astonishingly charming yet affected person fairly wrested from her!
In fact Birge’s Corners called on Thurley prepared to ask curious and mortifying questions, only to make a hurried exit in quite a different frame of mind. For with a perfectly cordial manner Thurley met all alike. She had a faculty of making them feel their own selves quite impossible; they were ill at ease before her—nor did they ask her to sing, she forestalled that before the subject of the weather was exhausted. They left saying that “Thurley had a way with her—and Dan could thank his lucky star he had been saved from the marriage.” Thurley repaid no calls—not even to Lorraine, although the latter had asked her from a sense of duty. She lived in her own way at the Fincherie with Miss Clergy nodding approval on whatsoever she did or demanded. In a short time, when she flooded the town with what the village dubbed as lunatics, no one was over-keen to have her call.