I
Lavinia stood in the sun-room, staring perplexedly across the lawn in
the direction of Vine Cottage. She was trying to decide a ponderous
question. To call on the new tenant ... or to wait the prescribed
two weeks? David and the children felt that a neighbourly visit was
already overdue. Probably, Larimore had said at breakfast, Mrs. Ascott
knew nothing of the silly custom which prevailed in Springdale, and
would think her landlady either hostile or rude. For once in her life
Lavinia Trench was uncertain. The new tenant was a woman of the world.
Ominous distinction. How could one gauge a neighbour who had crossed
the ocean sixteen times and had lived in every European capital from
London to Constantinople? She did not wear black. Incomprehensible for
a widow. Likely as not, she held Springdale unworthy the display of
her expensive weeds. Or perhaps she was saving them for some adequate
occasion. Just going to Dr. Schubert’s laboratory to work ... one’s
old clothes would serve for that. Besides, there were so many new fads
about mourning. It might be that taupe was the correct thing. She would
write and ask Sylvia about it.
Sylvia was the one member of the family whose opinion was accorded a
meed of respect--now that she had gone to Detroit to live. It was too
bad that she should have moved to another city, just when a woman who
might have been of service to her had come to Springdale. It was always
that way. Life offered the great desideratum--after the wish or need
for it had gone by. Life, Lavinia Trench’s life, was an endless chain
of disappointments. Of this there was no shadow of doubt. David and
the children had heard the statement reiterated with such consistent
regularity that they failed now to hear it at all--like the noise of
the trolley cars on Sherman Avenue, behind the Trench home, that at
first made such a deafening clatter.
“You seem to get everything you ask for,” her second son, Robert, had
once reminded her. “That’s more than you can say for the rest of us.”
Whereat she reeled off such a catalogue of woes that even Bob was
silenced.