Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/164

 'Lanice, her soul is now free from her...entangling body. Can you not think of her soul and forget the corruption of the flesh?'

'No.'

Lanice had automatically begun to dress and the tears that Pauline had awaited trickled upon her clean linen and splashed upon her ugly brown merino dress. Not until the last button was fastened would Pauline give her the letter. As she read it, she saw her father, and pitied him. How strangely was her life sprung from these two people who of all the world understood her least. Physically she resembled her father. Augustus had thought she might have something of her mother's wantonness and Anthony had proved it. But at least she had a touch, a spark of her father's scholarly tendencies.

'I cannot imagine,' Pauline whipped out, 'where you are going.'

Then Lanice noticed with amazement that she had her bonnet in her hand and had pulled on her heavy walking-boots with elastic sides.

'Oh, just to walk, along the Mill Dam, anywhere...'

'Nonsense! I'll order breakfast.'

With one of her odd little bursts of tact Pauline suggested consulting an atlas and the two young women pored over it and located Florence, and Pauline led the conversation away from tragic Florence to the congenial subject of European tours.