Mary Wollaston | Page 2

had had any sleep at
all, with an open grin and that triumphant "Not a wink," she had a
prophetic sense of what was going to happen. She was going to ask him
more questions and he was going to tell her something perfectly
ghastly.
She felt herself slipping, but she pulled up. "What's in Mary's letter?"
she asked.
She knew that this was not quite fair, and the look that it brought to his
face--a twinge of pain like neuralgia--awakened a sharp compunction in
her. She did not know why--at least not exactly why--his relation with
his daughter should be a sore spot in his emotional life, but she knew
quite well that this was true. There was on the surface, nothing, or
nowhere near enough, to account for it.
He had always been, Miss Wollaston felt, an adorer to the verge of
folly of this lovely pale-blonde daughter of his. He had indulged her
outrageously but without any evident bad results. Upon her mother's
death, in 1912 that was, when Mary was seventeen years old, she had,
to the utmost limit that a daughter could compass, taken her mother's
place in the bereaved man's life. She had foregone the college course
she was prepared for and had taken over very skillfully the
management of her father's household; even, in a surprisingly
successful way, too, the motherly guidance of her two-years-younger
brother, Rush. Miss Wollaston's testimony on these two points was

unbiased as it was ungrudging. She had offered herself for that job and
had not then been wanted.
Two years later there had been a quarrel between John and his daughter.
She fell in love, or thought she did--for indeed, how could a child of
nineteen know?--with a man to whom her father decisively and almost
violently objected. Just how well founded this objection was Miss
Wollaston had no means of deciding for herself. There was nothing
flagrantly wrong with the man's manners, position or prospects; but she
attributed to her brother a wisdom altogether beyond her own in
matters of that sort and sided with him against the girl without
misgiving. And the fact that the man himself married another girl
within a month or two of Mary's submission to her father's will, might
be taken as a demonstration that he was right.
John had done certainly all he could to make it up with the girl. He
tried to get her to go with him on what was really a junket to
Vienna--there was no better place to play than the Vienna of those
days--though there was also some sort of surgical congress there that
spring that served him as an excuse, and Mary, Miss Wollaston felt,
had only herself to blame for what happened.
She had elected to be tragic; preferred the Catskills with a dull old aunt
to Vienna with a gay young father. John went alone, sore from the
quarrel and rather adrift. In Vienna, he met Paula Carresford, an
American opera singer, young, extraordinarily beautiful, and of
unimpeachable respectability. They were in Vienna together the first
week in August, 1914. They got out together, sailed on the same ship
for America and in the autumn of that year, here in Chicago, in the
most decorous manner in the world, John married her.
There was a room in Miss Wollaston's well ordered mind which she
had always guarded as an old-fashioned New England village
housewife used to guard the best parlor, no light, no air, no dust,
Holland covers on all the furniture. Rigorously she forbore to speculate
upon the attraction which had drawn John and Paula together--upon
what had happened between them--upon how the thing had looked and
felt to either of them. She covered the whole episode with one blanket

observation: she supposed it was natural in the circumstances.
And there was much to be thankful for. Paula was well-bred; she was
amiable; she was "nice"; nice to an amazing degree, considering. She
had made a genuine social success. She had given John a new lease on
life, turned back the clock for him, oh--years.
Mary, Miss Wollaston felt, had taken it surprisingly well. At the
wedding she had played her difficult part admirably and during the few
months she had stayed at home after the wedding, she had not only kept
on good terms with Paula but had seemed genuinely to like her. In the
spring of the next year, 1915, she had, indeed, left home and had not
been back since except for infrequent visits. But then there was reason
enough--excuse enough, anyhow--for that. The war was enveloping
them all. Rush had left his freshman year at Harvard uncompleted to go
to France and drive an ambulance (he enlisted a little later in the French
Army). Mary had gone to New