She worked with Antone and Santoza cultivating an attitude of indifference to offset their unpleasant personalities. Miss Clergy, in her squirrel cage of a world, looked on with pleased but feeble eyes and told Thurley she must go abroad with Ernestine Christian. “You’ll come, too?” Thurley begged. “You must not stay so alone. All you do is to drive and read—and you do read the same books over and over—and talk with me a little and sleep a great deal. When I drag you into a shop you are as timid as can be and you won’t meet people though I’ve coaxed and begged. Please come with us—think of France, Spain, Italy,” Thurley hurried on to produce many new and tempting arguments. Miss Clergy shook her head. “He came from Italy,” she said. “I could not bear it.” Remorseful, undecided what was best to say, Thurley stood back abashed. “Oh, don’t let it hurt for so long—you’ve burnt up all your joy,” recalling Hobart’s words. Miss Clergy waved Thurley off. “I’ll go to a rest cure,” she decided. “Now be off, my head is starting to ache.” Still Thurley hesitated. “You won’t go back to the Corners?” she asked. Miss Clergy gave a cackling laugh. “Don’t worry, Thurley, I’d not go back even to dance at Dan Birge’s wedding.” Thurley left the room. She tried Ernestine’s antidote for heart stirrings as she practised scales, louder and louder in more and more glorious a voice until Miss Clergy fell asleep, happy at heart—for had she not at the eleventh hour saved a genius from mediocrity and secured revenge for her withered tragedy? The first Sunday morning in May, Polly Harris appeared to carry Thurley off, first to her attic to retrieve something she had forgotten, and next to Collin Hedley’s garden and château a few miles up the Hudson. “I knew this wasn’t lesson day and so I was sure you would come along. Wear something old because Collin’s place is one of those shabby-elegant affairs where new costumes seem vulgar. I think the only time when Lissa is ever uncomfortable is at Collin’s garden parties, but she has to come because she is jealous of Mark and there she is, a great, painted doll among real things.” Polly audaciously danced about Miss Clergy’s rooms while Thurley hurried into her blue serge with a flat, black sailor. Polly kept up a pleasing conversation with Miss Clergy as to Thurley’s début and the proposed trip abroad, the wonderful things Bliss had been doing in London and what a jolly world it was anyhow, actually tucking an extra pillow behind Miss Clergy’s back and leaving her the last issue of a shocking art journal as her proper Sabbath reading. Hobart had truly prophesied that when Polly went to heaven she would be given the position of keeping every one chirked up when things promised to be a trifle ponderous. “Let’s be ordinary critters and fly down to my sky parlor on a Fifth Avenue ’bus,” she proposed. “I pay the fares,” jingling her coin purse.