Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/33

 thought—"because I wanted you to escape the blight that touches everything at Pentlands.")

"I'm glad," the girl replied. "I'm glad because it makes everything different. . . . I can't explain it. . . . Only as if everything had more meaning than it would have otherwise."

Suddenly Olivia kissed her daughter and said: "You're a clever girl; things aren't wasted on you. And now go along to bed. I'll stop in to say good-night."

She watched the girl as she moved away through the big empty hall past the long procession of Pentland family portraits, thinking all the while that beside them Sybil seemed so fresh and full of warm eager life; and when at last she turned, she encountered her father-in-law and old Mrs. Soames moving along the narrow passage that led from the writing-room. It struck her sharply that the gaunt, handsome old John Pentland seemed really old to-night, in a way he had never been before, old and a little bent, with purplish circles under his bright black eyes.

Old Mrs. Soames, with her funny, intricate, dyed-black coiffure and rouged cheeks and sagging chin supported by a collar of pearls, leaned on his arm—the wreck of a handsome woman who had fallen back upon such silly, obvious tricks as rouge and dye—a vain, tragic old woman who never knew that she was a figure of fun. At sight of her, there rose in Olivia's mind a whole vista of memories—assembly after assembly with Mrs. Soames in stomacher and tiara standing in the reception line bowing and smirking over rites that had survived in a provincial fashion some darker, more barbaric, social age.

And the sight of the old man walking gently and slowly, out of deference to Mrs. Soames' infirmities, filled Olivia with a sudden desire to weep.

John Pentland said, "I'm going to drive over with Mrs. Soames, Olivia dear. You can leave the door open for me."