Page:A daughter of the rich, by M. E. Waller.djvu/47

Rh she could wear a reception dress like mamma's, of white broadcloth and sable, and trip up the steps of the various houses, and trip down again with a bevy of young girls laughing and chatting so merrily.

All that had ceased when Hazel was nine, and the young father had made her mistress in her mother's place. It was such a great house! and there were so many servants! and the housekeeper was so strict! and it was so queer to sit at the round table in the big dining-room and try to look at papa over the silver épergne in the centre!

When she was eleven, she entered one of the large private schools which many of her little mates attended. Soon it came to be the "girls of our set" with Hazel; and then there followed music-lessons, and violin-lessons, and riding-lessons, and dancing-class, and riding-days in the Park, and lunch-parties with the girls, and theatre-matinée-parties, and concerts at Carnegie Hall, and birthday parties, and sales—school and drawing-room affairs—and Lenten sewing-classes; until gradually her little society life had become an epitome of her mother's, and when she began to shoot up like a bean-sprout, lose her round face and the delicate pink from her cheeks, uncles and aunt and cousin and friends whispered of her mother's frail constitution, and that it was time to take heed.

Then it was that the physician, who had helped to bring her into the world, was summoned hastily to prevent her early departure from it. This was the "curious case" that so bothered him: and this pale, languid girl of