Also, it would
look original, would cause talk--would give her the coveted sense
of achievement.
When she descended to show herself to her father and say good
night to him, she was certainly dressed by the same pattern that
caused him to be talked about throughout that region. Her gown
was mussed, had been mended obviously in several places, had not
been in its best day becoming. But this was not all. Her hair
looked stringy and dishevelled. She was delighted with herself.
Except during an illness two years before never had she come so
near to being downright homely. ``Martha will die of shame,''
said she to herself. ``And Mrs. Bertram will spend the evening
explaining me to everybody.'' She did not definitely formulate
the thought, ``And I shall be the most talked about person of the
evening''; but it was in her mind none the less.
Her father always smoked his after-dinner cigar in a little room
just off the library. It was filled up with the plain cheap
furniture and the chromos and mottoes which he and his wife had
bought when they first went to housekeeping--in their early days
of poverty and struggle. On the south wall was a crude and
cheap, but startlingly large enlargement of an old daguerreotype
of Letitia Hastings at twenty-four--the year after her marriage
and the year before the birth of the oldest child, Robert, called
Dock, now piling up a fortune as an insider in the Chicago
``brave'' game of wheat and pork, which it is absurd to call
gambling because gambling involves chance.
Pages:
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55