Free The White Lady by Grace Livingston Hill Page A

reasoning to convince Mrs. Wetherill that it would be good for her health to move out of her great elegant rooms, where peaceful regularity moved on money-oiled wheels. Constance almost despaired of winning the day without revealing the whole story, but at last the grandmother succumbed.
    “Well, dear child, perhaps you’re right. I suppose I should enjoy it some, though I’ve never felt any desire to go traipsing over the earth the way some people do. But I suppose you’ll enjoy it, and it’s very nice that you want me with you. Yes, I’ll go. And now, where is it you want me to go? Abroad, of course. It’s a number of years since I crossed the ocean. I’m not very fond of the water.” Constance could see her wavering again. She flew to her side and knelt down before her.
    “No, indeed, you dear grandmother. I’m not going to drag you across the ocean. Europe’s much too public for me. What I want is to find a lovely little quiet village, where, after we have traveled around some, we can take a house for a while and get away from all this rush of city life. It doesn’t amount to a row of pins. I want to get rested and find out what life means.”
    “Dear child,” said her grandmother, taking the girl’s face between her fine, wrinkled hands with their rich fall of rare laces in the wrists. “Dear child”—her eyes searched Constance’s face—“has something gone wrong with your heart? Has someone disappointed you? Isn’t Morris Thayer—hasn’t he—I thought he was devotion itself. He kept calling me after you left, and I’m sure I forwarded a letter or two in his handwriting. You haven’t quarreled, have you?”
    Constance was surprised that her quiet, unobserving grandmother had taken so much notice of her affairs. She had always been reticent about them, and her grandmother had never questioned nor seemed to notice. She flushed up guiltily but laughed in answer.
    “No, Grandmother,” she said, “that’s not the matter. Morris Thayer and I do not quarrel, but yet—I don’t know but I am a little disappointed in him, though it doesn’t matter much, I’m sure. I want to get away from him and them all. I’m tired of the everlasting sameness of it. I want to do a lot of nice unconventional things that you can do when you’re away from home. You know, Grandmother?”
    The grandmother thought she understood that there had been a disagreement of some kind between the girl and her beau and, deciding that perhaps the young man needed the lesson of a separation for a while, acquiesced without further comment.
    At last Constance went to her room, satisfied that her grandmother suspected nothing and that she would make her no further trouble.
    There was a large pile of correspondence awaiting her attention. She looked at it wearily. She had no taste now for all that had made her life heretofore. She wondered at herself that so soon she could be interested in other things. Just a month before all her care had been to which dance she should go and whom she would invite. Now she was entering with eagerness into a plan to get rid of it all. Would she be sorry by and by, when it was too late and she could not come back to it?
    For an instant she longed for the old, safe, easy life of ease, with plenty of money to spend and no fear of ignominy in the future. But that could not be. She must go forward to a future with five thousand dollars as capital, and that would be intolerable here. The precise, respectable little cousin who had stayed with her grandmother while she was away was a sample of what that would be. All her life this cousin had been hampered by too much respectability to save her from a monotony to which custom, her family, and a lack of funds had condemned her. Now, at fifty, she wore made-over dresses, and scrimped, and stayed with relatives to keep her hands as white and useless as those of a member of her highborn family should be. “Poor Cousin Kate, of course she must be invited, she