In the house of Lawrence there were many daughters, and the eldest
thereof was Elvira.
At the age of thirty-two Elvira, to the budding younger Lawrences, was
hopelessly aged and sere, and Eulalie, in particular, a lately opened
blossom of eighteen, made it a matter of daily duty to keep Elvira's
soul from closing its eyes, even in the briefest nap, upon this fact.
Elvira had grown into her spinsterhood without rebellion and with the
quietude of mind conferred by an even disposition. She had been a
trifle old-maidish in her youth. That was in the era of bangs and
frizzes and heads of hair that resembled ill-used dish mops.
"Gaudy but not neat," had been Elvira's comment, and she let her light
brown locks lie softly close to her head, undipped and unkinked. And
mankind, with eyes accustomed to the ever present moppy snarls and
curls, vaguely supposed Elvira to be behind the times, and amiably
passed her by.
Later, Elvira developed the spinsterly accomplishment of darning her
own delicate silk stockings to finished perfection, and was promptly
importuned by all the young Lawrences to darn theirs. She
consented--and her doom was pronounced.
When twenty-five years of life had deepened the smooth pink of
Elvira's cheek and amplified the lissome curves of her figure, her
next younger sister, Hazel, a girl of twenty-two, had asked her to sit
in the drawing room and play propriety on the evenings when the
younger sister received callers, and she had done so.
When the matrimonial destiny of Hazel was fulfilled, Marion was coming
forward to be chaperoned; then Rosamond; and now--thorniest bud on the
Lawrence family tree--Eulalie was fully blown, and quite alive to the
beguilements of dress and the desirability of beaux.
Eulalie's exactions were upsetting to the tranquil mind. Eulalie
wanted--not possession of the earth, but to _be_ the earth, and to be
duly revolved around by friends, relatives and countless planetary
lovers. Elvira's days grew turbid and her nights devoid of repose.
There had been no comforting maternal support to nestle against since
the birth of the youngest Lawrence flower, and the paternal bush
towered out of reach in an aloof atmosphere of bonds and rentals and
dividends. One old-fashioned point of view he enforced upon his
children's vision: the elder daughter must supervise and chaperon the
younger ones to the last jot, and it must be done without disturbance
of the business atmosphere.
So Elvira warred with her daily briers alone. Reproach and appeal
alike spattered off Eulalie's buoyant nature as a water sprinkler's
steadiest shower rolls in globules from the crisp, unmoistened leaves
of the nasturtium.
"Spinsters are so fussy," she deplored, comfortably. "Just because
they have no beaux themselves, they can't bear to see a girl have a
caller now and then."
"My dear, keep up a slight acquaintance with truth," besought Elvira;
"a caller now and then would give me a chance to mend my stockings and
to get to bed by nine o'clock a few nights in the week. As it is, I
have to idle my time away evening after evening, sitting and grinning
at your flocks and herds of young men until I am so sleepy I have to
go and coax pa to drop a big slipper on the floor overhead, to
indicate that it's bedtime. Hazel and Marion and Rosamond encouraged
only a moderate number of beaux, and them only until they naturally
paired off with the right ones and could scat the rest off. But you
hang on to them all. There is hardly an evening you don't have from
one to five on hand, though you surely can't want them."
Eulalie giggled joyously.
"I do want them--every tinker of them. Poor old girl, you never knew
the fun of keeping a lot of men in a continual squirm. However, I
think possibly what you call the 'right one' is bobbing up."
"Most fervently do I hope so," sighed Elvira.
The strain of excessive chaperoning was wearing upon her.
"Your sister looks tired," a late acquisition of Eulalie's made
observation, compassionately, one evening, seeing Elvira nod over her
uncongenial Battenberg-ing by the piano lamp.
"Yes--she's such an early-to-bed crank," Eulalie cheerfully replied,
"and I suppose it isn't a lot of fun to sit over there alone doing
Battenberg with us chatting just out of good hearing range."
Hugh Griswold had been blessed with a good, old-fashioned mother, and
among the precepts bequeathed her son had been one not so distant of
kinship from the Golden Rule:
"Treat everybody well."
"Suppose we move into good hearing range, then?" he suggested.
"Oh, you can go, if you want to." Eulalie's eyebrows curved into brown
velvet crescents. "I'm very well satisfied here. Did I tell you Major
Yates was going to bring me a pair of guinea pigs to-morrow?"
The next time Hugh Griswold called he brought his uncle, an elderly
widower, with a bald, intellectual forehead and large billows of
whisker. The uncle beamed upon Eulalie with fatherly benignance, and
then established friendly communication with Elvira.
"I thought it might brisk things up a little for Miss Elvira to let
him come." Hugh's apologetic tone seemed, somehow, the result of
Eulalie's upward-arching eyebrows.
"Oh," said she--a cool little crescendo.