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 enough to marry, and so’s Myrtle Cuyler. And wouldn’t it be a kind of fascinatin’ story if this savin’ her life was to bring them together—him bein’ what he is and her bein’ who she is. You read about sich things, and I’ll venture that’s what’ll come about.”

Lydia turned a displeased face upon Mrs. Bowen, and noticed for the first time how common Mrs. Bowen looked and how dowdy her hat was and how loud her voice. She had always rather liked Mrs. Bowen before, and wondered now how it was she had never noticed such glaring defects.

“Be a fine thing for young Burke if he was to marry into a fam’ly like that,” Mrs. Bowen went on. “Folks’d have to take another tack with him then…. Kind of hard on Myrtle, maybe, but she’s Myrtle Cuyler, jest the same, and folks ’ud have to put up with her husband whoever he was…. Anyhow, my husband Chet says young Burke’s gettin’ on fine in business. He’s got to kind of like him.”

Lydia stood very straight and severe; she eyed Mrs. Bowen coldly. “Angus Burke doesn’t have to marry anybody,” she said frostily, in her most lofty and forbidding manner. “His friends are satisfied with him as he is.” Color was rising in her face and it was apparent she was on the verge of what Rainbow knew as her “tantrums.”