On this occasion Page wrote rapidly and steadily for a few moments after Laura’s entrance into the room. Then she paused, her eyes growing wide and thoughtful. She wrote another line and paused again. Seated on the floor, her hands full of gloves, Laura was murmuring to herself.
“Those are good … and those, and the black suedes make eight. … And if I could only find the mate to this white one. … Ah, here it is. That makes nine, nine pair.”
She put the gloves aside, and turning to the stockings drew one of the silk ones over her arm, and spread out her fingers in the foot.
“Oh, dear,” she whispered, “there’s a thread started, and now it will simply run the whole length. …”
Page’s scratching paused again.
“Laura,” she asked dreamily, “Laura, how do you spell ‘abysmal’?”
“With a y, honey,” answered Laura, careful not to smile.
“Oh, Laura,” asked Page, “do you ever get very, very sad without knowing why?”
“No, indeed,” answered her sister, as she peeled the stocking from her arm. “When I’m sad I know just the reason, you may be sure.”
Page sighed again.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she murmured indefinitely. “I lie awake at night sometimes and wish I were dead.”
“You mustn’t get morbid, honey,” answered her older sister calmly. “It isn’t natural for a young healthy little body like you to have such gloomy notions.”
“Last night,” continued Page, “I got up out of bed and sat by the window a long time. And everything was so still and beautiful, and the moonlight and all—and I said right out loud to myself,
‘My breath to Heaven in vapour goes—
You know those lines from Tennyson:
‘My breath to Heaven in vapour goes,
May my soul follow soon.’
I said it right out loud just like that, and it was just as though something in me had spoken. I got my journal and wrote down, ‘Yet in a few days, and thee, the all-beholding sun shall see no more.’ It’s from ‘Thanatopsis,’ you know, and I thought how beautiful it would be to leave all this world, and soar and soar, right up to higher planes and be at peace. Laura, dearest, do you think I ever ought to marry?”
“Why not, girlie? Why shouldn’t you marry. Of course you’ll marry some day, if you find—”
“I should like to be a nun,” Page interrupted, shaking her head, mournfully.
“—if you find the man who loves you,” continued Laura, “and whom you—you admire and respect—whom you love. What would you say, honey, if—if your sister, if I should be married some of these days?”
Page wheeled about in her chair.
“Oh, Laura, tell me,” she cried, “are you joking? Are you going to be married? Who to? I hadn’t an idea, but I thought—I suspected.”
“Well,” observed Laura, slowly, “I might as well tell you—someone will if I don’t—Mr. Jadwin wants me to marry him.”
“And what did you say? What did you say? Oh, I’ll never tell. Oh, Laura, tell me all about it.”
“Well, why shouldn’t I marry him? Yes—I promised. I said yes. Why shouldn’t I? He loves me, and he is rich. Isn’t that enough?”
“Oh, no. It isn’t. You must love—you do love him?”
“I? Love? Pooh!” cried Laura. “Indeed not. I love nobody.”
“Oh, Laura,” protested Page earnestly. “Don’t, don’t talk that way. You mustn’t. It’s wicked.”
Laura put her head in the air.
“I wouldn’t give any man that much satisfaction. I think that is the way it ought to be. A man ought to love a woman more than she loves him. It ought to be enough for him if she lets him give her everything she wants in the world. He ought to serve her like the old knights—give up his whole life to satisfy some whim of hers; and it’s her part, if she likes, to be cold and distant. That’s my idea of love.”
“Yes, but they weren’t cold and proud to their knights after they’d promised to marry them,” urged Page. “They loved them in the end, and married them for love.”
“Oh, ‘love’!” mocked Laura. “I don’t believe in love. You only get your ideas of it from trashy novels and matinees. Girlie,” cried Laura, “I am going to have the most beautiful gowns. They’re the last things that Miss Dearborn shall buy for herself, and”—she fetched a long breath—“I tell you they are going to be creations.”
When at length the lunch bell rang Laura jumped to her feet, adjusting her coiffure with thrusts of her long, white hands, the fingers extended, and ran from the room exclaiming that the whole morning had gone and that half her bureau drawers were still in disarray.
Page, left alone, sat for a long time lost in thought, sighing deeply at intervals, then at last she wrote in her journal:
“A world without Love—oh, what an awful thing that would be. Oh, love is so beautiful—so beautiful, that it makes me sad. When I think of love in all its beauty I am sad, sad like Romola in George Eliot’s well-known novel of the same name.”
She locked up her journal in the desk drawer, and wiped her pen point until it shone, upon a little square of chamois skin. Her writing-desk was a miracle of neatness, everything in its precise place, the writing-paper in geometrical parallelograms, the pen tray neatly polished.
On the hearth rug, where Laura had sat, Page’s searching eye discovered traces of her occupancy—a glove button, a white thread, a hairpin. Page was at great pains to gather them up carefully and drop them into the waste basket.
“Laura is so flyaway,” she observed, soberly.
When Laura told the news to
