As the man of finance turned the interview over in his mind, a curious
balance was struck--and his heart softened towards his son. There
might have been other tongue-lashings. No woman could have achieved
such fluency without practice. Before he reached the front door of
the little bank, Lavinia was in her own room, her compact figure half
submerged in the feather bed, her hot tears of shame and chagrin
wetting the scarlet stars of the quilt her own deft fingers had pieced.
She had lost her temper--it was easily misplaced--but the scene she had
raised had no share in her memory of the encounter. Her humiliation
blotted all else from view. It was not only that she had aimed at the
highest, and lost. She loved Calvin Stone with all the passion of a
fiery nature--loved him with a depth and intensity that might be gauged
by the hate that loomed on the surface of her wrath. And there was no
one in the whole world to whom she could open her heart.
Mrs. Larimore knew there had been a quarrel, a quarrel that outran the
morning’s tempest in violence; but when she ventured to ask what the
trouble was, Lavinia told her curtly that it was none of her business.
Now she stood outside the door, listening to her daughter’s stormy
sobbing. She had never been on intimate terms with her children,
and the relationship with her eldest daughter was most casual. A
headstrong girl. Where she got her ambition--unless it was a heritage
from her Grandmother Larimore--no one could say. The other members of
the family were easygoing, content with the day’s pleasure and profit.
But Lavinia was avid for work, for praise, for position. She would
shine as Mrs. Calvin Stone, if ever.... And then Mrs. Larimore began
afresh to wonder.