Short stories; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Having graduated with honors, she learned stenography--learned it
thoroughly and well, as was her way with whatever she undertook--and
presently found a place as secretary to Dallam Wybrant, the leading
merchandise broker of the three in town. Now Dallam Wybrant was youngish
and newly widowed--bereft but rallying fast from the grief of losing a
wife who had been his senior by several years. Knowing people--persons
who could look through a grindstone as far as the next one, and maybe
farther--smiled with meaning when they considered the prospect. A
good-looking, shrewd girl, always smart and trig and crisp, always with
an eye open for the main chance, sitting hour by hour and day by day in
the same office with a lonely, impressionable, conceited man--well,
there was but one answer to it. But one answer to it there was. Nobody
was very much surprised, although probably some mothers with
marriageable daughters on their hands were wrung by pangs of envy, when
Dallam Wybrant and Eleanor Millsap slipped away one day to Memphis and
there were married.
As Eleanor Millsap, self-reliant, self-sufficient and latterly
self-supporting, the girl through the years had steadily been growing
out of the domestic orbit which bounded the lives of her parents. As
Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, bride of an up-and-coming business man, with an
assured social position and wealth--as our town measured wealth--in his
own name she was now to pass entirely beyond their humble horizon and
vanish out of their narrowed social ken. True enough, they kept right on
living, all three of them, in the same town and indeed upon paralleling
and adjacent streets; only the parents lived in their shabby little
sealed-up coffin box of a house down at the poorer end of Yazoo Street;
the daughter, in her handsome new stucco house, as formal and slick as a
wedding cake, up at the aristocratic head of Chickasaw Drive. And yet to
all intents and purposes they were as far apart, these two Millsaps and
their only child, as though they abode in different countries. For she,
mind you, had been taken up by the best people. But none of the best
people had the least intention of taking up her father and mother as
well. She probably was as far from expecting it or desiring it as any
other could be. In fact a tale ran about that she served notice upon her
parents that thereafter their lives were to run in different grooves.
They were not to seek to see her without her permission; she did not
mean to see them except when and where she chose, or if she chose--and
she did not choose.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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