Perhaps the most humiliating moment of Dulcie Cowan's childhood had been
when Mary Dean had called her Indian giver. Dulcie was a child of
affluence. She had always had everything she wanted; but she had not
been spoiled. She had been brought up beautifully and she had been
taught to consider the rights of others. She lived in an old-fashioned
part of an old city, and her family was churchly and conscientious.
Indeed, so well-trained was Dulcie's conscience that it often caused her
great unhappiness. It seemed to her that her life was made up largely of
denying herself the things she wanted. She was tied so rigidly to the
golden rule that her own rights were being constantly submerged in the
consideration of the rights of others.
So it had happened that when she gave to Mary Dean a certain lovely
doll, because her mother had suggested that Dulcie had so many and Mary
so few, Dulcie had spent a night of agonized loneliness. Then she had
gone to Mary.
"I want my Peggy back."
"You gave her to me."
"But I didn't know how much I loved her, Mary. I'll buy you a nice new
doll, but I want my Peggy back."
It was then that Mary had called her Indian giver. Mary had been a
sturdy little thing with tight-braided brown hair. She had worn on that
historic occasion a plain blue gingham with a white collar. To the
ordinary eye she seemed just an every-day freckled sort of child, but to
Dulcie she had been a little dancing devil, as she had stuck out her
forefinger and jeered "Indian giver!"
Dulcie had held to her point and had carried her Peggy off in triumph.
Mary, with characteristic independence, had refused to accept the
beautiful doll which Dulcie bought with the last cent of her allowance
and brought as a peace offering. In later years they grew to be rather
good friends. They might, indeed, have been intimate, if it had not been
for Dulcie's money and Mary's dislike of anything which savored of
patronage.
It was Mary's almost boyish independence that drew Mills Richardson to
her. Mills wrote books and was the editor of a small magazine. He came
to board with Mary's mother because of the quiet neighborhood. He was
rather handsome in a dark slender fashion. He had the instincts of a
poet, and he was not in the least practical. He needed a prop to lean
on, and Mary gradually became the prop.
She was teaching by that time, but she helped her mother with the
boarders. When Mills came in late at night she would have something for
him in the dining-room--oysters or a club sandwich or a pot of
coffee--and she and her mother and Mills would have a cozy time of it.
In due season Mills asked her to marry him, and his dreams had to do
with increased snugness and with shelter from the outside world.
They had been engaged three months when Dulcie came home from college.
There was nothing independent or practical about Dulcie. She was a real
romantic lady, and she appealed to Mills on the æsthetic side. He saw
her first in church with the light shining on her from a stained-glass
window. In the middle of that same week Mrs. Cowan gave a garden party
as a home-coming celebration for her daughter. Dulcie wore embroidered
white and a floppy hat, and her eyes when she talked to Mills were
worshipful.
He found himself swayed at last by a grand passion. He thought of Dulcie
by day and dreamed of her by night. Then he met her by accident one
afternoon on Connecticut Avenue, and they walked down together to the
Speedway, where the willows were blowing in the wind and the water was
ruffled; and there with the shining city back of them and the Virginia
hills ahead, Mills, flaming, declared his passion, and Dulcie,
trembling, confessed that she too cared.