Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/253

 actually asleep, Marjorie saw when she crept over by Clara's bed and looked down at her tranquil face.

Marjorie put out the light and opened wide one of the windows; she made no start toward bed but stood near the open window staring down on Clearedge Street, while her thought leaped to Mrs. Russell's apartment where, for all she knew or might suppose, her father had returned; it leaped, her thought, to her mother sleeping, undoubtedly as serenely as Clara, in her compartment on the train rushing to New York; it leaped, for less vivid instants of imagination, to Billy, to Gregg; to Rinderfeld; to Mr. Saltro; and then, abandoning its jumping from individual to individual, it set before her a new cosmogony.

What a simple now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep world she had stepped from, she thought, as she reckoned how all her life she had gone to bed, never with anything seriously worrying her or threatening her until a few weeks ago; what a world of romance and childish beliefs had been that centered about her room around the corner of the hall from mamma's and papa's; in that world, you thought of a good, able man wooing you to take you for wife, to work for you, win you a home, not at the start but yet eventually more prosperous than your father's; you thought of yourself winning "better" social position, your children—for in certain connections you imagined more than you yourself might carry out—becoming companions of children of people whom you had only begun to know; you fancied your husband becoming president, possibly of the United States or at least of a great Chicago railroad or bank or business corporation, and consequently you fancied yourself in the White House or with a great Lake Forest estate.