She lifted a pretty hand to a pin at her throat, bit
her lip—not with the smile, but mysteriously—and
at the last instant before her shadow touched the
stranger, let her eyes gravely meet his. A moment
later, having arrived before the house which was her
destination, she halted at the entrance to a driveway
leading through fine lawns to the intentionally important
mansion. It was a pleasant and impressive place
to be seen entering, but Alice did not enter at once.
She paused, examining a tiny bit of mortar which
the masons had forgotten to scrape from a brick in
one of the massive gate-posts. She frowned at
this tiny defacement, and with an air of annoyance
scraped it away, using the ferrule of her cane—an
act of fastidious proprietorship. If any one
had looked back over his shoulder he would not have
doubted that she lived there.
Alice did not turn to see whether anything of the
sort happened or not, but she may have surmised that
it did. At all events, it was with an invigorated
step that she left the gateway behind her and went
cheerfully up the drive to the house of her friend
Mildred.
CHAPTER IV
Adams had a restless morning, and toward noon he asked
Miss Perry to call his daughter; he wished to say
something to her.
“I thought I heard her leaving the house a couple
of hours ago—maybe longer,” the nurse
told him. “I’ll go see.”
And she returned from the brief errand, her impression
confirmed by information from Mrs. Adams. “Yes.
She went up to Miss Mildred Palmer’s to see
what she’s going to wear to-night.”
Adams looked at Miss Perry wearily, but remained passive,
making no inquiries; for he was long accustomed to
what seemed to him a kind of jargon among ladies,
which became the more incomprehensible when they tried
to explain it. A man’s best course, he
had found, was just to let it go as so much sound.
His sorrowful eyes followed the nurse as she went back
to her rocking-chair by the window, and her placidity
showed him that there was no mystery for her in the
fact that Alice walked two miles to ask so simple
a question when there was a telephone in the house.
Obviously Miss Perry also comprehended why Alice
thought it important to know what Mildred meant to
wear. Adams understood why Alice should be concerned
with what she herself wore “to look neat and
tidy and at her best, why, of course she’d want
to,” he thought—but he realized that
it was forever beyond him to understand why the clothing
of other people had long since become an absorbing
part of her life.
