“Oh, poor Cora Spooner was terribly in love with an actor. He was in a stock company at Pike and he did encourage her—”
“Tell that to the marines,” Dan said testily, going to the talking machine and putting on a lively band record. “I can’t help that. I notice it didn’t affect her appetite. Why don’t she get a job?”
“Well, there’s nothing in her line here,” Lorraine’s forehead wrinkled anxiously. She was afraid Dan would forbid Cora’s coming to the house, which command would be absolute. Cora Spooner brought a certain zest into Lorraine’s existence. She was a rather handsome girl of twenty-three or four with no intention of working for her living if it could be otherwise arranged. Her mother, whose small pension and capital enabled her to “get along,” was Cora’s chief bugbear. Cora was a bundle of discontent and weird notions, trying to play the bird in the gilded cage rôle and complain that Birge’s Corners was nothing but a prison. She soon discovered that Lorraine’s car was good to ride about in, her food the best to be had; it was jolly to stay in the pink spare room with the over-drapes and crystal candlesticks instead of her own forlorn cottage. Besides, her mother did not understand her; fancy wanting any one to be a stenographer or school teacher when heaven only knew that Cora was born for romance, adventure! She had a good notion to cut her hair short and masquerade about the country as a boy,—men always had such good times. Cora had had a half dozen beaux who always dropped her after a certain length of time, saying she was “soft” and lazy and her mother ought to make her work, and turning their attentions to plain-faced girls who could cook and who had a little money in the bank!
Cora dressed in the extreme of fashion, badgering Dan for advance style sheets and asking him to order things for her for which she could not pay, wearing them about with a selfconscious mannikin air. When orange silk stockings and white kid boots were the vogue, Cora stepped forth in the most blazing of orange stockings and the snowiest of white kid boots, her skirts just reaching below the knee. When the matter was mentioned to her mother, she said with a weak smirk that Cora was her pa all over again. Every one said if she could have the training she would make a great actress.