Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/41

Rh been of "boys" for girls of fourteen, she felt a thrill of delight at the prospect of the handsome and eligible young men who would some day come paying respects to Reba.

"She's getting to be quite a young lady. You'll have to watch out," Reba recalled the minister having smilingly said to her mother and aunts when she appeared before him for the first time in her lengthened skirts. "There'll be young men coming thick and fast now, I'm thinking."

How they had beamed! Inwardly how she had beamed too. Aunt Augusta had had the parlor furniture re-covered in preparation for the minister's prediction. All three of the women who had tended Reba so long, with such diligence, expected wonderful things of her when at last she stood before them a finished young lady. When they began removing life-long restraints from Reba they observed her as eagerly as if (instead of being anything so ruled by the laws of nature as a girl, or even a rose) she were a magical Japanese flower that had only to be dropped into a glass of water to unfold into marvelous beauty.

But Reba disappointed them. For five years Aunt Augusta repeated the two weeks at the fashionable summer-resorts, but it was absolutely useless. No handsome and eligible young men came courting Reba. No young men of any kind came courting her. In spite of long skirts and turned-up hair, removed restrictions, summer-resorts full of young people, diamond bracelets, gold watches and chains, Reba would not unfold. Occasionally one finds a Japanese flower that refuses to bloom in the water. It has been too tightly compressed. So had Reba.