Here was Main Street. Dear old busy Main Street, with its shops and its hotels and its brilliantly lighted drugstores, the latter only serving to accentuate the deserted blackness. She was sorry that she had not arrived at an earlier hour, when the windows would have been lighted and the streets busier with people; though, of course, it was always dull on Sunday night. Cricky! Sunday! She had an engagement with Houston Van Ploon to attend a concert to-night, and she had forgotten to send him word. He had been at Uncle Jim’s, stiff as a ramrod and punctual to the second, of course.
Taffy, who had been whining his newly re-aroused distress over the absence of Gail, now suddenly remembered that she was home again, and turned around with a short, sharp bark. He stuck out his tongue and rolled it at her, laughing, and his tail flopped. He quivered all over.
Now up the avenue, the dear old wide avenue, with its double rows of trees and its smooth asphalt, glistening like sprinkling rain from the quartz sand embedded in its surface, and with the prosperous looking brown stone houses lining each side of the way, every house with its lawn and its shrubbery and its glass-doored vestibule. They were nearly all alike these houses, even to lawns and shrubbery, except that some of them had no iron dogs in the grass, and others had no little white cupids holding up either a goose spouting water out of its mouth or an umbrella which furnished its own rain. They were dear houses, every one, ever so much more personal than the heartless residences of New York; and her friends lived in them. It was so good to be home!
She became more excited now. There was their own house just ahead, occupying nearly half the block, and slightly larger than the others! It was brilliantly lighted from the basement to the attic, and all the servants were either on the front steps or peeping from around the corner of the house, and old mammy Emma, who had cooked Gail’s own little individual custard pies since she was a baby, had her apron to her eyes. Gail’s heart was just plumb full! There was no place, oh, no place in all the world like home!
Taffy jumped out of the machine as it turned in at the gate, and ran up ahead to bark a proper welcome, and touched the top step with a circle like a whip-snapper, and was back again, a long brown and white streak bellying down to the grass, and prancing a circle around the machine, and leaping in the air to bark, and back up to the steps and back to the machine; then lay down in the grass and rolled over, and, jumping up, chased a cat out of the next yard, in the mere exuberance of joy; but was back again to crouch before Gail, and whine, as she stepped out of the car.