PEOPLE LIKE THAT
A NOVEL
by
KATE LANGLEY BOSHER
Author of "Mary Cary" etc.
Illustrated
1916
BOOKS BY
KATE LANGLEY BOSHER
PEOPLE LIKE THAT. Illustrated. Post 8vo
HOW IT HAPPENED. Frontispiece. Post 8vo
THE HOUSE OF HAPPINESS. Frontispiece. Post 8vo
MARY CARY. Frontispiece. Post 8vo
MISS GIBBIE GAULT. Frontispiece. Post 8vo
THE MAN IN LONELY LAND. Frontispiece. Post 8vo
TO
LUCY BOSHER JANNEY
CHAPTER I
One of the advantages of being an unrequired person of twenty-six,
with an income sufficient for necessities, is the right of choice as
to a home locality. I am that sort of person, and, having exercised
said right, I am now living in Scarborough Square.
To my friends and relatives it is amazing, inexplicable, and beyond
understanding that I should wish to live here. I do not try to make
them understand; and therein lies grievance against me. Because of
my failure to explain what they are pleased to call a peculiar
decision on my part, I am at present the subject of heated criticism.
It will soon stop. What a person does or doesn't do is of little
importance to more than three or four people. By Christmas my
foolishness will have ceased to cause comment, ceased to interest
those to whom it doesn't matter really where or how I live.
I like living in Scarborough Square very much. After many years
spent in the homes of others I am now the head of half a house, the
whole of which is mine; and even though it is situated on the last
square of respectability in a part of the town long forgotten by the
descendants of its former residents, I am filled with a sense of
proprietorship that is warm and comforting, and already I have
learned to love it--this nice, old-fashioned house in which I live.
Until very recently Scarborough Square was only a name. There had
been no reason to visit it, and had I ventured to it I would have
seen little save a tiny park bounded on four sides by houses of
shabby gentility, for the most part detached, and of a style of
architecture long since surrendered to more undesirable designs. The
park is but an open space whose straggly trees and stunted shrubs and
dusty grass add dejection to the atmosphere of shrinking
respectability which the neighborhood still makes effort to maintain;
but that, too, I have learned to love, for I see in it that which I
never noticed in the large and handsome parks up-town.
As a place of residence this section of the city I am just beginning
to know has become very interesting to me. No one of importance
lives near it, and the occupants of its houses, realizing their
social submergence and pecuniary impotence, have too long existed in
the protection of obscurity to venture into the publicity which civic
attention necessitates, and on first acquaintance it is not
attractive. I agree with my friends in that. I did not come here
because I thought it was an attractive place in which to live.
They cannot say, however, even my most protesting friends, that I am
not living in a perfectly proper neighborhood. The front of my house
faces, beyond the discouraged little park, a strata of streets which
unfold from lessening degrees of dreariness and dinginess to
ever-increasing expensiveness and unashamed architectural
extravaganzas, to the summit of residential striving, called, for
impressiveness, the Avenue, but behind it is a section of the city of
which I am as ignorant as if it were in the depths of the sea or the
wilds of primeval forest. I have traveled much, but I do not know
the city wherein I live. I know but a part of it, the pretty part.
There was something Mrs. Mundy wanted to say to me to-night, and did
not say. I love the dear soul. I could not live here without her,
could not learn what I am learning without her help and sympathy and
loyalty, but at times I wish she were a bit less fond of chatting.
She is greatly puzzled. She, too, cannot understand why I have come
to Scarborough Square to live, and I am quite certain she thinks it
strange I do not tell her. How can I tell that of which I am not
sure myself--that is, clearly and definitely sure?
I am not trying to be sure. It is enough that I am here, free to
come and go as I choose, to plan my day as I wish, to have time for
the things I once had no time for, and why must there always be
explanations and reasons and justifications for one's acts? The
daily realization each morning, on awaking, that the day is mine,
that there are no customs with which to comply, no regulations to
follow, no conventions to be conformed to, at the end of two weeks
still stirs and thrills and awes me a little, and I am constantly
afraid it is not true that I am here to stay. And then again with
something of fear and shrinking and uncertainty I realize my bridges
are burned and I must stay.
"It's pleased you are with your rooms, I hope, Miss Dandridge?"
Hands on her hips, Mrs. Mundy had looked somewhat anxiously at me
before going out. "If it's a home-looking place you're after, you've
got it, but when you first come down to Scarborough Square it made me
feel queer inside to think of your living here, really living. If
you think you can be satisfied--"
"I am sure I can be satisfied. Why not?" I smiled and, going over
to the window, straightened the curtain which had caught and twisted
a fern-leaf growing in its box. "I am a perfectly unincumbered human
being who--"
"But an unincumbered woman ain't much of a human being." Mrs. Mundy
dropped the afternoon paper she had brought up and stooped to get it.
"I mean a woman is made for incumbrances, and if she don't have
any--" She hesitated, and looked around the room with its simple
furnishings, its firelight and lamplight, its many books and few
pictures, its rugs and desk and tables, the gifts of other days, and
presently she spoke again. "Being you like so to look out the
windows, it's well this house has two front rooms opening into each
other. If it's comfortable and convenient that you want to be,
you're certainly that, but comforts and conveniences don't keep you
company exactly."
"I don't want company yet. You and Bettina are all I need. I
haven't said I was to live here a thousand years, or that I wouldn't
get tired of myself in less time, but until I do--"
There was a ring at the front-door bell and Mrs. Mundy went to answer
it. The puzzled look I often saw in her eyes when talking to me
still filled them, but she said nothing more except good night, and
when I heard her footsteps in the hall below I went to the door and
locked it. This new privacy, this sense of freedom from unescapable
interruption, was still so precious, that though an unnecessary
precaution, I turned the key that I might feel perfectly sure of
quiet hours ahead, and at my sigh of satisfaction I laughed.
Going into my bedroom, which adjoined my sitting-room, I hung in the
closet the coat I had left on a chair, put away my hat and gloves,
and again looked around, as if they were still strange--the white bed
and bureau, the wash-rugs, the muslin curtains, the many contrasts to
former furnishings--and again I sighed contentedly. They were mine.
The house I am now living in is indeed an old-fashioned one, but well
built and of admirable design. The rooms are few--only eight in
all--and four of them I have taken for myself--the upper four. The
lower floor is occupied by Mrs. Mundy and Bettina, her little
granddaughter. When I first saw the house its condition was
discouraging. Not for some time had it been occupied, and repairs of
all kinds were needed. To get it in order gave me strange joy, and
the weeks in which it was being painted and papered and beautified
with modern necessities were of an interest only a person, a woman
person, can feel who has never had a home of her own before. When
everything was finished, the furnishings in place, and I established,
I knew, what I no longer made effort to deny to myself--that I was
doing a daring thing. I was taking chances in a venture I was still
afraid to face.