Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/31

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

first and last time, 'I've never been so happy, not for years. Now I won't dream about Mamma ever again. You are an angel.'

She turned away her head again and sat with her profile turned towards Pauline, who was encouraged in her proselyting by a certain intellectuality she found in it. The nose especially, in spite of its neatness, might easily belong to a Great Mind.

'Now you are in Boston you shall have everything—why, to a girl of your genius the world lies open like a flower.'

Lanice turned towards her. Her face, seen from the front, was of a different calibre. It held a veiled suggestion of earthiness, perhaps more threatening to the owner's happiness than Mamma's frank paganism. Almost as if by an act of will, however, the expression changed, or, rather, wiped itself out. She looked, with her small pointed chin, open brow, and eyes like a maiden's prayer, rather like a fashion-plate drawing from a 'Godey's Book.'

3

Boston Common at last, and the still, small light of dusk lacing the naked trees. Cousin Poggy commanded her coachman to make a turn about the Common. Ranks of ordered brick houses, pleasing in proportion and fastidious in detail, were drawn up on three sides of the Common and slightly superciliously gazed at this tattered Eden from which the cows had been but recently banished. Lanice had not dreamed that in the whole country there were so