Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/67

66 her to live with me until such time as she married or managed for herself.

When father died, he left the old home in Reading, Massachusetts, with sufficient income to keep it up. Chester had refused to benefit by father’s death; he always said he could take care of himself better than a woman could take care of herself. For this reason alone, I felt morally engaged to do what I could for Chester’s girl.

Portia came to live with me, then, and attended the public school of Reading and later on went to high school. By the time she had graduated from high school she had already made up her mind what she wanted to do. She intended to go to Vassar, where her father had made application when she was born, as proud parents do nowadays. The only obstacle was the lack of sufficient money to pay her tuition and other expenses. This did not dismay my niece.

Early in her girlhood I had occasion to admire her courage; her absolute fearlessness, rather. She faced the situation of no funds, and made herself mistress of it. The details I do not fully know, but I learned afterward that she eked out the little I managed to send her, by tutoring, by taking down lectures in shorthand and selling the transcribed copies to fellow students. Portia passed her final examinations with high marks and returned to me for a brief period of repose while looking about for a position of some kind.

Just what she was fitted for, she herself did not know. She had thought of library work, but I believe this was merely because she loved books so dearly, not because the career of a librarian appealed to her. Finally she decided that her best opportunity might lie in a secretaryship and was about to leave Reading for New York, when a letter arrived one morning that had been forwarded to her from college.

It was a wonderful morning in early July, 1910, when this momentous letter arrived. The sun was no brighter than my girl’s face when she lifted it from the letter to exclaim: "Here is the very thing I would have chosen out of all the world, Aunt Sophie, could I have put my wishes into words."

She tossed the letter across the table to me and turned to stare out of the window into the dappled sun and shade of our pretty yard, which I realized she was really not seeing at all.

I took up the letter and read it hastily. It was from one Howard Differdale, of Lynbrook, N. Y., a frank, straightforward statement of his needs. As nearly as I can remember, it ran somewhat in this tenor:

He was a bachelor, living alone in a great isolated house about five city blocks, however, from a community known as Meadowlawn, and near subway lines that made it but half an hour from the heart of Lynbrook. The management of the house was in the hands of a "faithful Chinaman, Fu Sing." Mr. Differdale was engaged in occult research and experiment and desired a young woman assistant who was not only interested in his line of work but capable of helping materially, and of making the necessary observations in shorthand and on the typewriter.

He gave references as to his financial standing. He mentioned that his mother and sister lived in Meadowlawn and attended a Presbyterian church there. He would be glad to pay all expenses for Portia and a chaperon, if my niece were sufficiently interested to make the trip to Lynbrook for the purpose of deciding personally whether or not she desired to take the position he was offering.

The salary he offered was comparatively small, so much so that I wondered at my niece’s enthusiasm. The matter of remuneration, however, was taken up later by Mr. Differdale