Opposite Miss Eudora Yates's old colonial mansion was the perky modern Queen Anne residence of Mrs. Joseph Glynn. Mrs. Glynn had a daughter, Ethel, and an unmarried sister, Miss Julia Esterbrook. All three were fond of talking, and had many callers who liked to hear the feebly effervescent news of Wellwood. This afternoon three ladies were there: Miss Abby Simson, Mrs. John Bates, and Mrs. Edward Lee. They sat in the Glynn sitting-room, which shrilled with treble voices as if a flock of sparrows had settled therein.
The Glynn sitting-room was charming, mainly because of the quantity of flowering plants. Every window was filled with them, until the room seemed like a conservatory. Ivy, too, climbed over the pictures, and the mantel-shelf was a cascade of wandering Jew, growing in old china vases.
"Your plants are really wonderful, Mrs. Glynn," said Mrs. Bates, "but I don't see how you manage to get a glimpse of anything outside the house, your windows are so full of them."
"Maybe she can see and not be seen," said Abby Simson, who had a quick wit and a ready tongue.
Mrs. Joseph Glynn flushed a little. "I have not the slightest curiosity about my neighbors," she said, "but it is impossible to live just across the road from any house without knowing something of what is going on, whether one looks or not," said she, with dignity.
"Ma and I never look out of the windows from curiosity," said Ethel Glynn, with spirit. Ethel Glynn had a great deal of spirit, which was evinced in her personal appearance as well as her tongue. She had an eye to the fashions; her sleeves were never out of date, nor was the arrangement of her hair.
"For instance," said Ethel, "we never look at the house opposite because we are at all prying, but we do know that that old maid has been doing a mighty queer thing lately."
"First thing you know you will be an old maid yourself, and then your stones will break your own glass house," said Abby Simson.
"Oh, I don't care," retorted Ethel. "Nowadays an old maid isn't an old maid except from choice, and everybody knows it. But it must have been different in Miss Eudora's time. Why, she is older than you are, Miss Abby."
"Just five years," replied Abby, unruffled, "and she had chances, and I know it."
"Why didn't she take them, then?"
"Maybe," said Abby, "girls had choice then as much as now, but I never could make out why she didn't marry Harry Lawton."
Ethel gave her head a toss. "Maybe," said she, "once in a while, even so long ago, a girl wasn't so crazy to get married as folks thought. Maybe she didn't want him."
"She did want him," said Abby. "A girl doesn't get so pale and peaked-looking for nothing as Eudora Yates did, after she had dismissed Harry Lawton and he had gone away, nor haunt the post-office as she used to, and, when she didn't get a letter, go away looking as if she would die."
"Maybe," said Ethel, "her folks were opposed."
"Nobody ever opposed Eudora Yates except her own self," replied Abby. "Her father was dead, and Eudora's ma thought the sun rose and set in her. She would never have opposed her if she had wanted to marry a foreign duke or the old Harry himself."
"I remember it perfectly," said Mrs. Joseph Glynn.
"So do I," said Julia Esterbrook.
"Don't see why you shouldn't. You were plenty old enough to have your memory in good working order if it was ever going to be," said Abby Simson.
"Well," said Ethel, "it is the funniest thing I ever heard of.
If a girl wanted a man enough to go all to pieces over him, and he wanted her, why on earth didn't she take him?"
"Maybe they quarreled," ventured Mrs. Edward Lee, who was a mild, sickly-looking woman and seldom expressed an opinion.
"Well, that might have been," agreed Abby, "although Eudora always had the name of having a beautiful disposition."
"I have always found," said Mrs. Joseph Glynn, with an air of wisdom, "that it is the beautiful dispositions which are the most set the minute they get a start the wrong way. It is the always-flying-out people who are the easiest to get on with in the long run."
"Well," said Abby, "maybe that is so, but folks might get worn all to a frazzle by the flying-out ones before the long run. I'd rather take my chances with a woman like Eudora. She always seems just so, just as calm and sweet. When the Ames's barn, that was next to hers, burned down and the wind was her way, she just walked in and out of her house, carrying the things she valued most, and she looked like a picture--somehow she had got all dressed fit to make calls--and there wasn't a muscle of her face that seemed to move. Eudora Yates is to my mind the most beautiful woman in this town, old or young, I don't care who she is."
"I suppose," said Julia Esterbrook, "that she has a lot of money."
"I wonder if she has," said Mrs. John Bates.
The others stared at her. "What makes you think she hasn't?"
Mrs. Glynn inquired, sharply.
"Nothing," said Mrs. Bates, and closed her thin lips. She would say no more, but the others had suspicions, because her husband, John Bates, was a wealthy business man.
"I can't believe she has lost her money," said Mrs. Glynn. "She wouldn't have been such a fool as to do what she has if she hadn't money."
"What has she done?" asked Mrs. Bates, eagerly.
"What has she done?" asked Abby, and Mrs. Lee looked up inquiringly.
The faces of Mrs. Glynn, her daughter, and her sister became important, full of sly and triumphant knowledge.
"Haven't you heard?" asked Mrs. Glynn.
"Yes, haven't you?" asked Ethel.
"Haven't any of you heard?" asked Julia Esterbrook.
"No," admitted Abby, rather feebly. "I don't know as I have."
"Do you mean about Eudora's going so often to the Lancaster girls' to tea?" asked Mrs. John Bates, with a slight bridle of possible knowledge.
"I heard of that," said Mrs. Lee, not to be outdone.
"Land, no," replied Mrs. Glynn. "Didn't she always go there? It isn't that. It is the most unheard-of thing she had done; but no woman, unless she had plenty of money to bring it up, would have done it."
