Throughout that afternoon adult members of the Atwater
family connection made futile efforts to secure all
the copies of the week’s edition of The North
End Daily Oriole. It could not be done.
It was a trying time for “the family.”
Great Aunt Carrie said that she had the “worst
afternoon of any of ’em,” because young
Newland Sanders came to her house at two and did not
leave until five; all the time counting over, one
by one, the hours he’d spent with Julia since
she was seventeen and turned out, unfortunately, to
be a Beauty. Newland had not restrained himself,
Aunt Carrie said, and long before he left she wished
Julia had never been born—and as for Herbert
Illingsworth Atwater, Junior, the only thing to do
with him was to send him to some strict Military School.
Florence’s father telephoned to her mother from
downtown at three, and said that Mr. George Plum and
the ardent vocalist, Clairdyce, had just left his
office. They had not called in company, however,
but coincidentally; and each had a copy of The
North End Daily Oriole, already somewhat worn
with folding and unfolding. Mr. Clairdyce’s
condition was one of desperate calm, Florence’s
father said, but Mr. Plum’s agitation left him
rather unpresentable for the street, though he had
finally gone forth with his hair just as he had rumpled
it, and with his hat in his hand. They wished
the truth, they said: Was it true or was it not
true? Mr. Atwater had told them that he feared
Julia was indeed engaged, though he knew nothing of
her fiance’s previous marriage or marriages,
or of the number of his children. They had responded
that they cared nothing about that. This man
Crum’s record was a matter of indifference to
them, they said. All they wanted to know was whether
Julia was engaged or not—and she was!
“The odd thing to me,” Mr. Atwater
continued to his wife, “is where on earth Herbert
could have got his story about this Crum’s being
a widower, and divorced, and with all those children.
Do you know if Julia’s written any of the family
about these things and they haven’t told the
rest of us?”
“No,” said Mrs. Atwater. “I’m
sure she hasn’t. Every letter she’s
written to any of us has passed all through the family,
and I know I’ve seen every one of ’em.
She’s never said anything about him at all,
except that he was a lawyer. I’m sure I
can’t imagine where Herbert got his awful information;
I never thought he was the kind of boy to just make
up such things out of whole cloth.”
Florence, sitting quietly in a chair near by, with
a copy of “Sesame and Lilies” in her lap,
listened to her mother’s side of this conversation
with an expression of impersonal interest; and if she
could have realized how completely her parents had
forgotten (naturally enough) the details of their
first rambling discussion of Julia’s engagement,
she might really have felt as little alarm as she
showed.
