Free This Side of Glory by Gwen Bristow Page B

goes to her room to read The Winning of Barbara Worth or to somebody’s house to play flinch—and Kester and I can giggle over the people I’ve seen.
    “I can imagine you wrinkling your nose and saying, ‘My daughter Eleanor, who can carry logarithms in her head!’ Don’t, dad. This marriage of mine is so ecstatic that there’s nothing I can tell you about it except that it’s right. I’m going to be one of the happy people who have no history.”
    Eleanor was surprised at the number of ladies who came to call. Obviously, if Lysiane’s friends had whispered questions about Kester’s unknown bride before his marriage, the fact of the marriage was an answer. She found the formalities droll, but since she expected to live at Ardeith the rest of her life she tried to sort out her callers, though it was not always easy. The ladies seemed much alike as they sat with bright smiles in the parlor. She did manage to distinguish a few of them—young Mrs. Neal Sheramy from Silverwood Plantation, who was pretty and frail, and coughed delicately, suggesting consumption; Kester’s cousin Sylvia St. Clair, fortyish, with a scrawny neck and a face that looked like a whine, who hinted at her own unhappy marriage, gossiped about other people’s, and asked Eleanor veiled but intimate questions about hers, which Eleanor parried with a wild desire to giggle, but so adroitly that she won Lysiane’s commendation—“I must say you dealt with Sylvia better than most people do, my dear; even if she is my own second cousin I can’t deny she is a fool;” and gathering that Sylvia was one of the people who would rather go to the gallows at once and have it over with than be condemned to a lifelong agony of minding their own business, Eleanor chuckled at Lysiane and received an amused smile in return; and she remembered Violet Purcell, a dark, vivid girl who wore a lavender dress and a black feather boa, and whose conversation, spiced with epigrams, had a bitter pleasantness like an olive. Eleanor did not mind the callers as long as she and Kester could laugh about them in the evenings, for Kester’s sense of humor and his sense of people were alike so keen that he made comments far more penetrating than Lysiane’s.
    After Lysiane had gone home to New Orleans, their life settled down to the leisurely plantation routine. Kester and Eleanor gave parties and went to them, or spent long evenings alone, never done with what they had to say to each other. When cotton-picking was over Kester gave the Negroes a barbecue, at which he and Eleanor, with several of their friends, acted as hosts and guests of honor, enthroned in state on cotton-bales while the darkies brought them beer and pig-sandwiches; after which they were driven in a wagon to the big house to dance through the evening. The day they got news of Woodrow Wilson’s election Kester appeared unexpectedly with a troop of guests to celebrate, and when Eleanor, not yet used to such impromptu parties, got him aside and asked how she was expected to feed so many people without notice Kester retorted merrily, “Vermont, Utah and Eleanor, all for Taft!”—and disappeared into the kitchen. Eleanor followed him, protesting that she was not for Taft, she was glad about Wilson, but supper for ten people was something else; but Kester was chattering with Mamie, the cook who had been at Ardeith ever since he could remember and who understood these things, and he shooed Eleanor back into the parlor with orders not to worry.
    The guests were already around the piano, singing while Violet Purcell played for them. Entering with a tray of drinks, Kester flung Eleanor a teasing glance. She whispered under cover of the music.
    “Is it going to be all right?”
    “Of course,” Kester assured her, and shouted, “Anybody want a drink?”
    Nearly everybody did, and Neal Sheramy from Silverwood Plantation called, “Kester, may I dance with your beautiful wife?”
    As they hopped off together in a