Detective and mystery stories; Love stories; Social secretaries -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
It was a hateful scene, degenerated—anyway on Suzanne’s part—into a
quarrel, a bitter arraignment of her mother as unloving and ungenerous.
For Mrs. Janney refused the money, put her foot down with a stamp that
carried conviction. She was even grimmer and more determined than her
daughter had expected, the girl’s anger and upbraidings ineffectual to
gain their purpose as spray to soften a rock. Her decision was ruthless;
Suzanne must pay her own debts, out of her own allowance. Yes, even if
she was written up in the papers. That was _her_ affair: if she did
things that were disgraceful she must bear the disgrace. The interview
ended by Suzanne rushing out of the room, a trail of loud, clamorous
sobs marking her passage to her own door.
When she had gone Mrs. Janney broke down and cried a little. She had
thought the girl improved of late, less selfish, more tender. And now
she had been so cruel; the charge of a lack in love had pierced the
mother’s heart. Mr. Janney, returned from his ride, found her there,
looking old, her eyes reddened, her voice husky. When he heard the
story, he took her hand and stroked it. His tact prevented him from
saying what he felt; what he did say was:
"That bridge money’ll have to be paid."
"It will _all_ have to be paid," Mrs. Janney sighed, "and I’ll have to
pay it as I always have. But I’m going to frighten her—let her think I
won’t—for a few days anyway. It’s all I can do and it may have some
effect."
Her husband agreed that it might but his thoughts were not hopeful.
There always had to be a crumpled rose leaf and Suzanne was theirs.
He accompanied his wife on her drive and was so understanding, so
unobtrusively soothing and sympathetic, that when they returned she was
once more her masterful, competent self. Noting a bank of storm clouds
rising from the east, she told Otto to bring the limousine when he came
for them at a quarter to eight. Inside the house she summoned Dixon and
said as the family would be out "the help"—it was part of her beneficent
policy to call her retinue by this name when speaking to any of its
members—could go out that night if they so willed. Dixon admitted that
they had already planned a general sortie on "the movies" in the
village. All but Hannah, the cook, who had "something like shooting
pains in her feet, and Delia, the second housemaid, who’d got an insect
in her eyes, Madam. But it wasn’t the hurt of it that kept her in, only
the look which she didn’t want seen."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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