Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/93

 on the road far down the valley had not moved. Someone had dimmed the lights. She thought of calling Aunt Henrietta's attention to it, and then changed her mind through a desire to spite her by keeping this bit of excitement a secret.

Mrs. Weatherby kept thinking of her approaching conversion. It was a subject which had occupied her a great deal lately; indeed, ever since she had abandoned the idea of founding a new religion out of her experience with new faiths. The idea of an "eclectic" faith combining the best points of all religions had come at length to die for lack of energy and any sense of organization. She was a muddled woman and being very rich she had no need of the material gains which commonly reward contemporary prophets. Indeed, the whole idea had been rather a failure. She had come to Brinoë to pass her twilight ("old age" was an expression she never used), expecting something of that triumph and that notoriety which had come to her in Winnebago Falls and later at Carmel and Los Angeles; and now it seemed that she had drawn a blank. No one noticed her, even when she drove to the town dressed all in white carrying tuberoses. There was, she told herself, too much competition among eccentrics in Brinoë. It was worse, even, than Los Angeles. (At the moment, as she sat before the blotched mirror, she experienced an actual jealousy of the posthumous notoriety of Miss Annie Spragg. That queer old woman had succeeded where she had failed.) 