Catholics -- United States -- Fiction; Love stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
“Know him?” he demanded.
“Of course I can’t be sure, but it is exactly like Mr. Anselm
Lancaster, and it is like no one else in all the world!” Cis said, her
eyes bright, her face flushed, her breath a little quickened.
“He is the one whom everybody looks at; when he comes into a room
you feel him as much as you see him. He can make anything trust him,
kittens, carrots, old women, anything! He speaks Italian as well as
English, and he speaks English like an Oxford Englishman. He would do
precisely what you describe, be a knight errant as soon for a poor
old immigrant as for a princess! It sounds like no one but Mr. Anselm
Lancaster!”
CHAPTER XXIV
THE BEACON
Precisely because she wanted exceedingly to stay away from the girls
and neglect the arrangement of their new rooms in the telephone
building, Cis arose betimes the next morning and went out early. She
could not rid herself of the conviction that the man whose chivalry
had so impressed Tom the previous night was Anselm Lancaster, and she
wanted to stay in the house, hoping that, if it were he, he would come
to look her up. It had been long, and seemed longer to Cis, since she
had heard from Miss Braithwaite. Mr. Lancaster had shown no remembrance
of her existence for months; it was now close upon May day, and spring
in the air increased Cis’s restless dissatisfaction, filling her with
a homesickness which was farther reaching and deeper than homesickness
for a definite place.
She told herself that it was absurd to identify Tom’s hero on so
slender a ground, and quite unpardonable to mope around the house
expecting Mr. Lancaster to call on her. “You never were silly when it
was the time to be silly; don’t begin it now, Cis Adair,” she sternly
told herself.
So she went down to look after her girls’ organization earlier than
usual, in order to rebuke her own tendency to folly, but, like most of
us, she compromised with her weakness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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