Free Giant by Edna Ferber Page B

the gifts of warmth and sympathetic understanding which tempered their wit. Sometimes, talking before the fire with a gay and friendly group, Leslie had a way of sitting on the hearth rug, her shoulder and arm pillowed against her father’s knee, her face turned up to him as he talked, her fine intelligent eyes seeming to absorb thelight in his face. At such times the younger men present were likely to take their handkerchiefs furtively from their pockets and wipe their brows. Electra, even in that fairly recent day, was merely a Greek legend, together with the equally bemused Oedipus.
    “I declare,” Mrs. Lynnton would say—she frequently prefaced her statements with a warning salvo such as I declare or I must say or if you want my opinion—“I declare, Leslie, I sometimes think your father and I will have you on our hands as an old maid. Leigh was late enough, twenty-three when she married, but look at her now, Lady Karfrey! So it turned out well enough in spite of her sarcastic ways when she was a girl.”
    “But Mama, you didn’t marry Papa until you were past twenty. And you did pretty well for yourself, you will admit. Married to the most wonderful man in the world, that’s all.”
    “I married your father because he asked me, and that’s the truth. I was no beauty and neither are you. You treat men as if they were girl friends, though you’ve had a hundred chances I must say.”
    “Not quite a hundred, Mama. Perhaps ten.”
    “Most girls have one, and snatch at it, and don’t let them tell you anything different. If you’re not married next year I’m going to dress up Lacey and put her in the parlor. She’ll be seventeen soon and there she is out at the stables day and night. It’s time she learned that all males aren’t quadrupeds.” She had a somewhat tangy tongue of her own, Nancy Lynnton.
    Equipped thus rather meagerly for matrimony, one would justifiably have thought the three Lynnton sisters fated for spinsterhood. On the contrary the big shabby Virginia house was clogged with yearning swains. Young Washington career men; slightly balding European sub-diplomats and embassy secretaries in striped trousers and cutaways; Virginia and Maryland squires of the huntin’ ridin’ and slightly run-down set; with a sprinkling of New York lawyers and Wall Street men and even an occasional Midwestern businessmen. Doctors who came ostensibly to confer with Horace Lynnton ended up in the vast hospitable kitchen (for the Lynntons were famous cooks in defiance of a day and place in which cooking was considered menial).Beaux haunted the verandas the parlors the stables. They swarmed all over the place—to the dismay of neighboring beauties—much as bees will sometimes desert the stately cool rose for a field of heady wild red clover.
    As for the boasted Virginia background, this lay so far in the past as to be misted by the centuries and discernible only to Mrs. Lynnton’s somewhat bemused eye. A great-great-great-grandfather had sailed overseas to Virginia in the 1600s, one of those indentured servants or jail bait whose descendants later became First Families of Virginia perhaps as legitimately as their more aristocratic contemporaries. But this traveler’s son too had possessed the spirit of roving adventure. He had moved with the tide of travel from Virginia to Kentucky to Indiana to Ohio. Mrs. Lynnton always skipped lightly over these geographical intervals when she spoke of herself as having descended from one of the F.F.V.s. Leslie and Lacey made nothing of this, or at best regarded it as a family joke. Leigh—now Lady Karfrey—having inherited something of her mother’s snobbishness, took the doubtful distinction more seriously. As for Doctor Horace Lynnton, late of Ohio, here was a great human being and a dedicated spirit disguised as a tall somewhat shambling man in a crumpled suit and bow tie slightly askew so that his wife or one of three daughters seemed always to be busy under his chin.