Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/16

 college,' but strangers coming from far lands and fine adventure. She shuddered and shut her narrow jaw. 'Dear God, please help me to think only of Higher Things.' She hated the thought of marriage. She hated the thought of men. Most of all she hated Mamma.

It could not be that she herself inherited something of Mamma's wicked wantonness, Mamma who had disgraced them all and had made Amherst an impossible place for her daughter to live. 'You must not think of Mamma. You must never think of her again. She is a bad woman, and you must be twice as good because she is so bad.'

But memory of that sweet, beguiling face was upon her, lips, currant smooth and ripely red, and dimples eddying high upon her left cheek. She could see her in a dozen characteristic postures. Mamma! How, on a sunny day, she would come sparkling out of the fashionable villa in Amherst ruffled in grey, a bit of a grey bonnet perched like a bird on her chestnut curls, and look up at the sky and smile at the sunshine as though the June day were her lover nervously waiting her approval. Mamma...never again Mamma. How could she have run off to Italy with one of Papa's own students in natural philosophy, young Roger Cuncliffe! Cuncliffe—the pretty boy with the light walk and feverish color and black curls. The rich boy who had been brought up in Europe. The sick boy for whom people felt so sorry.

Her white hands clenched in the depths of the fur. Her heart thumped and she was swept with a sense