A Fountain Sealed

A Fountain Sealed, by Anne
Douglas Sedgwick

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Title: A Fountain Sealed
Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick
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A FOUNTAIN SEALED
by
ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK
(Mrs. Basil de Sélincourt)
Author of 'The Little French Girl,' 'Franklin Winslow Kane,' 'Tante,'
etc.

I
Three people were sitting in a small drawing-room, the windows of
which looked out upon a wintry Boston street. It was a room rather
empty and undecorated, but the idea of austerity was banished by a
temperature so nearly tropical. There were rows of books on white
shelves, a pale Donatello cast on the wall, and two fine bronze vases
filled with roses on the mantelpiece. Over the roses hung a portrait in
oils, very sleek and very accurate, of a commanding old gentleman in
uniform, painted by a well-known German painter, and all about the

room were photographs of young women, most of them young mothers,
with smooth heads and earnest faces, holding babies. Outside, the snow
was heaped high along the pavements and thickly ridged the roofs and
lintels. After the blizzard the sun was shining and all the white glittered.
The national colors, to a patriotic imagination, were pleasingly
represented by the red, white and blue of the brick houses, the snow,
and the vivid sky above.
The three people who talked, with many intimate pauses of silence,
were all Bostonians, though of widely different types. The hostess,
sitting in an easy chair and engaged with some sewing, was a girl of
about twenty-six. She wore a brown skirt of an ugly cut and shade and
a white silk shirt, adorned with a high linen collar, a brown tie and an
old-fashioned gold watch-chain. Her forehead was too large, her nose
too short; but her lips were full and pleasant and when she smiled she
showed charming teeth. The black-rimmed glasses she wore
emphasized the clearness and candor of her eyes. Her thick, fair hair
was firmly fastened in a group of knobs down the back of her head.
There was an element of the grotesque in her appearance and in her
careful, clumsy movements, yet, with it, a quality almost graceful, that
suggested homely and wholesome analogies,--freshly-baked bread; fair,
sweet linen; the safety and content of evening firesides. This was Mary
Colton.
The girl who sat near the window, her furs thrown back from her
shoulders, a huge muff dangling from her hand, was a few years
younger and exceedingly pretty. Her skin was unusually white, her hair
unusually black, her velvety eyes unusually large and dark. In. her
attitude, lounging, graceful, indifferent, in her delicate face, the straight,
sulky brows, the coldly closed lips, the coldly observant eyes, a sort of
permanent discontent was expressed, as though she could find, neither
in herself nor in the world, any adequate satisfaction. This was Rose
Packer.
The other guest, sitting sidewise on a stiff chair, his hand hanging over
the back, his long legs crossed, was a young man, graceful, lean and
shabby. He was clean-shaven, with brown skin and golden hair, an

unruly lock lying athwart his forehead. His face, intent, alert, was
veiled in an indolent nonchalance. He looked earnest, yet capricious,
staunch, yet sensitive, and one felt that, conscious of these weaknesses,
he tried to master or to hide them.
These three had known one another since childhood. Jack's family was
old and rich; Mary's old and poor; Rose Packer's new and of fantastic
wealth. Rose was a young woman of fashion and her whole aspect
seemed to repudiate any closeness of tie between herself and Mary,
who passed her time in