the saintly-looking sort that would go on the rocks for some man,” Nina had said once, rather flippantly, “and never know she was shipwrecked. No man in the world could do that to me.”
But just then Elizabeth looked totally unlike shipwreck. Nothing seemed more like a safe harbor than the Wheeler house that afternoon, or all the afternoons. Life went on, the comfortable life of an upper middle-class household. Candles and flowers on the table and a neat waitress to serve; little carefully planned shopping expeditions; fine hand-sewing on dainty undergarments for rainy days; small tributes of books and candy; invitations and consultations as to what to wear; choir practice, a class in the Sunday school, a little work among the poor; the volcano which had been Nina overflowing elsewhere in a smart little house with a butler out on the Ridgely Road.
She looked what she was, faithful and quietly loyal, steady—and serene; not asking greatly but hoping much; full of small unvisualized dreams and little inarticulate prayers; waiting, without knowing that she was waiting.
Sometimes she worried. She thought she ought to “do something.” A good many of the girls she knew wanted to do something, but they were vague as to what. She felt at those times that she was not being very useful, and she had gone so far as to lay the matter before her father a couple of years before, when she was just eighteen.
“Just what do you think of doing?” he had inquired.
“That's it,” she had said despondently. “I don't know. I haven't any particular talent, you know. But I don't think I ought to go on having you support me in idleness all my life.”
“Well, I don't think it likely that I'll have to,” he had observed, dryly. “But here's the point, and I think it's important. I don't intend to work without some compensation, and my family is my compensation. You just hang around and make me happy, as you do, and you're fulfilling your economic place in the nation. Don't you forget it, either.”
That had comforted her. She had determined then never to marry but to hang around, as he suggested, for the rest of her life. She was quite earnest about it, and resolved.
She picked up the blue dress and standing before her mirror, held it up before her. It looked rather shabby, she thought, but the theater was not like a dance, and anyhow it would look better at night. She had been thinking about next Wednesday evening ever since Dick Livingstone had gone. It seemed, better somehow, frightfully important. It was frightfully important. For the first time she acknowledged to herself that she had been fond of him, as she put it, for a long time. She had an odd sense, too, of being young and immature, and as though he had stooped to her from some height: such as thirty-two years and being in the war, and having to decide about life and death, and so on.
She hoped he did not think she was only a child.
She heard Nina coming up the stairs. At the click of her high heels on the hard wood she placed the dress on the bed again, and went to the window. Her father was on the path below, clearly headed for a walk. She knew then that Nina had been asking for something.
Nina came in and closed the door. She was smaller than Elizabeth and very pretty. Her eyebrows had been drawn to a tidy line, and from the top of her shining head to her brown suede pumps she was exquisite with the hours of careful tending and careful dressing she gave her young body. Exquisitely pretty, too.
She sat down on Elizabeth's bed with a sigh.
“I really don't know what to do with father,” she said. “He flies off at a tangent over the smallest things. Elizabeth dear, can you lend me twenty dollars? I'll get my allowance on Tuesday.”
“I can give you ten.”
“Well, ask mother for the rest, won't you? You needn't say it's for me. I'll give it to you Tuesday.”
“I'm not going to mother, Nina. She has had a lot of expenses this month.”
“Then I'll borrow it from Wallie Sayre,” Nina said, accepting her defeat cheerfully. “If it was an ordinary bill it could wait, but I lost it at bridge last night and it's got to be paid.”
“You oughtn't to play bridge for money,” Elizabeth said, a bit primly. “And if Leslie knew you borrowed from Wallace Sayre—”
“I forgot! Wallie's downstairs, Elizabeth. Really, if he wasn't so funny, he'd be tragic.”
“Why tragic? He has everything in the world.”
“If you use a little bit of sense, you can have it too.”
“I don't want
“Pooh! That's what you think now. Wallie's a nice person. Lots of girls are mad about him. And he has about all the money there is.” Getting no response from Elizabeth, she went on: “I was thinking it over last night. You'll have to marry sometime, and it isn't as though Wallie was dissipated, or anything like that. I suppose he knows his way about, but then they all do.”
She got up.
“Be nice to him, anyhow,” she said. “He's crazy about you, and when I think of you in that house! It's a wonderful house, Elizabeth. She's got a suite waiting for Wallie to be married before she furnishes it.”
Elizabeth looked around her virginal little room, with its painted dressing table, its chintz, and its white bed with the blue dress on it.
“I'm very well satisfied as I am,” she said.
While she smoothed her hair before the mirror Nina surveyed the room and her eyes lighted on the frock.
“Are you still wearing that shabby old thing?” she demanded. “I do wish you'd get some proper clothes. Are you going somewhere?”
“I'm going to the theater on Wednesday night.”
“Who with?” Nina in her family was highly colloquial.
“With Doctor Livingstone.”
“Are you joking?” Nina demanded.
“Joking? Of course not.”
Nina sat down again on the bed, her eyes on her sister, curious and not a little apprehensive.
“It's the first time it's ever happened, to my knowledge,” she declared. “I know he's avoided me like poison. I thought he hated women. You know Clare Rossiter is—”
Elizabeth turned suddenly.
“Clare is ridiculous,” she said. “She hasn't any reserve, or dignity, or anything else. And I don't see what my going to the theater with Dick Livingstone has to do with her anyhow.”
Nina raised her carefully plucked eyebrows.
“Really!” she said. “You needn't jump down my throat, you know.” She considered, her eyes on her sister. “Don't go and throw yourself away on Dick Livingstone, Sis. You're too good-looking, and he hasn't a cent. A suburban practice, out all night, that tumble-down old house and two old people hung around your necks, for Doctor David is letting go pretty fast. It just won't do. Besides, there's a story going the rounds about him, that—”
“I don't want to hear it, if you don't mind.”
She
