Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/25

 To think of running off with one of Papa's own students. Every one in Amherst is astounded. Papa's the only one who doesn't seem to be surprised.'

'You mean, previously, other men, some other time...'

'No!' cried Lanice hotly, and her cheeks were suffused with color, as she lied desperately, remembering Mr. Alpheus Matthews of New York. She knew that for years this man, greatest of cotton brokers and managing director of Mamma's mills, had worshipped the pretty woman in his own arrogant way. It had been terrible, when she first had found out. Mamma had given her a red riding-habit she no longer fancied, and then had gone humming and smiling out of the house. The young girl, arrayed in her first adult finery, had slipped to the darkened best parlor where the Venetian blinds were always drawn, and the smell of moth preventatives was never relieved by an open window. She had been forbidden since childhood to enter this Blue Beard's chamber, yet confidently she pulled up a blind and became absorbed in her own newly found beauty reflected in the glass, mimicked Mamma's coquettish graces. That was the way Mamma felt all the time, light on her feet, giddy in the head, secret happiness springing up and up through her veins. Lanice shook the long scarlet plume on the beaver hat, threw back her head with shut eyes. Mr. Matthews, tiptoeing into the room, saw only the familiar red habit and the loved pretty gestures. A moment too late he discovered it was not the mill owner playfully protesting his caresses, but