Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/15

 As he had outlived his illusions so he had outlived most of his friends. Henry and Bessie dutifully erected a tall shaft, and voted down Henry's wife's suggestion that it say: "He has followed the trail into the sunset." It was odd that Katherine should have made it, really. Perhaps she had had a politely veiled sentiment for the old man, or for the more respectable portions of his past; anyhow she withdrew it at once when Bessie said that sentiments on monuments were as extinct as the dodo.

"Where'd you get that?" Henry asked her.

"I think I saw it somewhere," she said vaguely. But she lied. She had thought of it herself.

Then for several years Kay heard little of the ranch but as a hole; it was a hole one sunk money in and nothing came out. It was a liability and not an asset. Connected with this was a further fact that Bessie thought they were all made of money, and that she was a fool to want to hold on. And somewhat later further talk about Aunt Bessie, but not connected with the ranch. This time she seemed to have lost Uncle Ronald, but when she came back from Paris, having done so, she was not in mourning, and Kay learned that there were other ways than death by which one lost husbands. It was, however, not to be discussed, and if after that one wandered into Aunt Bessie's house and found a young man loudly declaiming in her boudoir while Aunt Bessie was having a marcel or a manicure through a half-opened door in her dressing room, one was not to discuss that either.

Aunt Bessie had a flair for what she called talented youth. There was another name for them, however, among her friends. They were generally called "Bessie's sympathizers."

Time went on, as it has a way of doing. The shaft was finished. It was ugly, but it was solid and dominating and uncompromising, which was rather fitting after all. Mademoiselle went back to France and Kay was sent to boarding school. She was sixteen then; a slim bit of a thing, aping her elders as well as she could, but with wide childish eyes which betrayed her essential innocence. On the night before she left Katherine summoned all her courage and went in to talk to her. She wanted, this queer reserved Katherine, to